Introduction
By MikeMirzayanov, 15 years ago, translation, In English

The team captain Natalia Bondarenko
The team captain Natalia Bondarenko
January 30, 2010 the delegation of the Saratov State University is leaving for the World Finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest. This year it's held in Harbin (hi, China), and that means that apart from an interesting contest, we have cold weather, ice statues, fried rice with prawns, and as I hope, Beijing Duck.

Our University will take part in the Contest for the 7th time, and for the team Saratov SU#1 this will be the 2nd Finals. It seems to be high time to introduce myself. I'm Mike Mirzayanov, and I'm this team's coach (and also all other teams from my university). In reality I'm the director of Programming Competitions Training Center, but in this case it doesn't matter. I became a part of this so-called olympic movement quite long ago, but since that time I've managed to take part in the finals of the ICPC, and in the finals of Google Code Jam, and onsite competitions by TopCoder (TCO and TCCC both). In brief, I do know what computer programming competitions are, but we won't speak about me.

We will speak about our team Saratov SU#1 and their participation in the coming World Finals. I plan to write a series of articles about our trip to China. No one knows, on whom Lady Luck will smile, and whether we'll return triumphant or defeated, but I hope my account will seem interesting to someone. Any questions? Ask them in your commentaries, and I'll answer them with pleasure.

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In Moscow
By MikeMirzayanov, 15 years ago, translation, In English
Paveletsky station met us as usual. Taxi, taxi, where are going young man? In the subway suspicious persons sell cellphones near the proclamation: "unauthorized trade is prohibited, fine of 10000 rubles". Fortunately the queue for tickets in the subway has flown by quickly - well, that we got up at first in two, as one moving twice as fast. 

Dima Matov quickly noticed that in Moscow we have arrived too early - beginning tomorrow at Mu-Mu cafes begin discounts of 50%. And when you try to change rubles into something more international we noticed that today is Sunday and banks do not work. Yes, we have arrived in Moscow too early :).

I went to Starbucks and sold Internet for 100 rubles. It was constantly falling off - so I hasten to write these lines before it disconnects again.

In the evening we will sit in the airplane, fly through Beijing, there will be 2.5 hours connection and "Hello, Harbin".

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Do you know that?
By MikeMirzayanov, 15 years ago, translation, In English
If you write solutions on C++ it regularly happens than input reading through std::cin appears to be slow because of the large input size. Certainly is more correct in such cases to write data reading more effectively - at least using scanf. But if the testing system uses GNU C++ (checked on MinGW 4.4.1, but I think it works on other versions too), and you don't want to rewrite input reading, it is possible to improve performance by only one line placed in the beginning of the program: ios_base::sync_with_stdio(0).

On my example where it was required to find the sum of one million integers, it has accelerated the program in 4.5 times. Tried to do the same test on MS Visual C ++ 9.0 - but it hasn't accelerated the reading.

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Memories: ACM-ICPC World Finals 2009
By MikeMirzayanov, 15 years ago, translation, In English

The World Finals of the 33rd International Collegiate Programming Contest for was held in the capital of Sweden, Stockholm. The contest was held in Europe for the third time: in 1999 it was held in Eindhoven (the Netherlands), in 2004 - in Prague (the Czech Republic). It was the first time the key role in the competition had been played by the University: it was held in the library of the Royal Technological University. One hundred best teams of the world took part in the final, while the preliminary rounds saw 7109 teams from 1838 Universities and 88 countries competing. It was the sixth time the Saratov State University had took part in ACM-ICPC World Finals.

The participants were placed in two hotels in the historic centre of Stockholm, Gamla Stan district. Our team was placed in the Grand Hotel Stockholm, the city's oldest hotel, built in 1874. The breathtaking view on the Old City and the Royal Palace made this hotel the favourite place for many film stars, politicians and other celebrities. The Grand Hotel is the only hotel in Sweden with the prestigious status The Leading Hotels of the World.

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What is Codeforces?
By MikeMirzayanov, 15 years ago, translation, In English
I noticed long ago, that all the websites about computer programming contests work on Web 1.0 principles. But the 21st century has come, the 30th International Programming Contest took place, and Google celebrated its 10th anniversary. Something has to be done! As Software-as-a-Service is conquering the world, contests administrators are still copying tests into judge systems. Something has to be done!

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