May 24, 2017 TCO Announcement Fun Marathon + DS Weekly Challenge #9

TCO Announcement Fun Marathon

As you’ve probably heard, on Friday we’ve learned the dates and location of the TCO17 onsite finals: Buffalo, NY. To celebrate this, we put together a little location-themed Marathon match. I admit buffalo wings might have convey the flavor of the location better, but we (implicitly) decided to skip a food-related problem in favor of the second most obvious attraction of the area: Niagara falls!
Disclaimer: Fishing in Niagara river is actually a thing, but we don’t guarantee that the fishing method described in the problem is legal and/or productive.
The concept of the problem is quite simple: you intend to do some fishing by installing traps at the bottom of the waterfall. The fish will spawn upstream, navigate down the river avoiding rocks and fall down the waterfall to end up in your traps – or successfully avoiding them. You are given the observations of fish haul on previous days, and you want to optimize average fish caught per trap in the three days you’ll be fishing.
This match will be rated, but it will not award TCO points in Marathon track. It will, however, feature…

Week #9 DS Challenge

TCO Announcement Marathon means that there is something interesting happening in Data Science tracks this week, so I can announce the challenge: the t-shirt will go to…
…The competitor who has maximal value of (final score / (1 + abs(number of full submissions – M))), where M is the median of numbers of full submissions of all participants.
The scores will be taken based on final standings. In case of a tie the lower-rated (before the event) member will win.

Week #8 Algorithm Challenge Result

As a reminder, the week #8 Algorithm challenge was…
…The competitor who does the latest successful challenge in Algorithm Round 2A.
14 minutes and 57 seconds into the Challenge phase (that’s what I call last-second!) gangsterveggies successfully challenged nshal’s 500-point problem. Congratulations!