Hi, everybody.
We would like you to join Live broadcast from ACM ICPC World Finals 2016. The broadcast will start at 8-00 ICT 19 May 2016, while the contest will start at 9-30 ICT. get more statistics afterwards.
The broadcast consists of two parts:
Main broadcast with comments from our analytic Egor. There will be presented all information about the contest, interviews and other interesting videos! Broadcast will be available in youtube and twitch.
Additional broadcast with videos from teams screens and web-cameras. This year you can influence what teams will be shown. For that, you should send the tweet in twitter, which contains #ICPC2016 and hashtag of the team. (The hashtags could be found in the page of each team under link social from MyICPC) If you prefer webcam to the screen, you could specify it with #camera. Examples of tweets: #ICPC2016 #ITMO, #ICPC2016 #ITMO #camera. We will show team if it gets enough votes. (Also, we count only one tweet per user per minute, so there is no need to spam votes) Broadcast will be available in youtube as second screen and twitch.
Also, we want to test our system tomorrow (18 march 2016) at 8-00 ICT. Dress rehearsal contest will start at 9-30 ICT, so all videos from teams and the second screen should be available starting from this time. Could you help us? :-)
At the end I want to mention everybody who is working on this broadcast:
Director: elizarov.
Script and beverages: lperovskaya.
Design of infographics and hardware: pashka.
Design of everything else: Mikhail Kutsov.
Video preparation: Viktoria Volochay.
Analytics and Creeping line manager: niyaznigmatul.
Analytics and commentator: Egor.
Flash zone interviewer: Charles Nevile.
Software developers: pashkal, Anna Malova and me.
Don't forget to subscribe on channels and tell everybody! See you on broadcast!
P.S.: We encourage you to use youtube rather than twitch. (Even if the twitch chat is more comfortable to use. ;-)) This will help us to get more statistics afterwards.
The first link to timeanddate has ICT time, while the second has UTC time.
Last year was an amazing broadcast, i expect this year be better. Just one tip, screen most be of the top teams. Last year it was streamed for at most half broadcast the low ranking teams screens, it is more interesting to see the screen of top teams. Sorry for my ridiculous english.
Great commentating! This year there was much less of the "is anyone there?" feeling the audience gets sometimes. (Though Roman's comments like "what is going on with the studio" from one of the past few years that somehow got on air — that was hilarious. So there's always an upside.)
Audio level was inconsistent, and generally too quiet. Some problem presentations I could hardly hear with all volume controls turned on max.
The problem presentations sound like they're aimed at red coders. For instance, I still don't get why for L, the second greedy sweep takes largest first.
The judging queue overlay — that's a great idea. Maybe there could be more visualisation ideas. E.g. showing a timeline for each top team with keyboard activity and problem submissions could be interesting.
Overall, I think it's the best broadcast yet. And yet, a lot more potential is left untapped.
The problem presentations have to be kept reasonably short, if we went into too much detail, they wouldn't fit into the broadcast. We always have to come up with a reasonable trade-off between the length and the level of detail. Specific suggestions on what to improve and how are always welcome :)
The judges have published their solution outlines in a PDF after the contest. If you are still missing the details, you can go read those -- and then possibly come here to ask more questions, or comment on youtube where the videos are now uploaded. Still, if you are unable to solve a WF problem, I believe that watching the presentation and then trying to fill in the details on your own is actually a good exercise.
One suggestion may be to describe a problem around the time of the peak of its submission activity, I guess among the top 30 teams that is. This way "team A is in the lead; now team B is in the lead; wait, team A is back" becomes more fun, as we in the audience can see at least something about what they did to solve a problem.
Also, since it's impossible to do justice to the whole problem set, emphasising the easier 2 to 5 problems (except the easiest one) might help connect with the audience. What about ambushing some of those coaches loitering in the hall and asking them to solve one of the problems (don't record that part), then interviewing them about how they solved it. The questions they asked themselves, false trails, errors in logic, intuitive leaps — this is all interesting.
That's about the solving component. About the coding component, it might be interesting to compare the 2 quickest-to-write solutions with a median one, with a timelapse of what the files looked like, side-by-side. Perhaps that could reveal some of the brilliance that is going on, but is invisible, except indirectly.
What other ways could be found of capturing the action?
We wanted to show problem presentations around the time several teams solved it, but unfortunately technical difficulties prevented us from that
Egor, can you solve the problems while commentating? ) I heard some chess grandmasters can play at near their usual performance while solving arithmetic problems continuously.
I knew problems and solutions in advance, so can't answer your question, sorry
On youtube, the stream isn't complete. Please fix it.
It was some kind of YouTube bug. Seems to be Ok now.
This year the live stream was awesome. Much better than any previous stream. Special thanks for the submissions queue visualization.