2011 Google Code Jam

I've been signed up for a few days now, but I'm very excited about the Google Code Jam.  This will be my 3rd time competing.  The format has been pretty consistent for the last 3 competitions, with one 24 hour qualification round, in which anyone solving one Small Input and one Large Input problem advances, followed by Round 1, split into 3 sub-rounds.  The top 1000 from each sub-round move on to round 2, and if you fail in Round 1A, you can retry in Round 1B and 1C.  Round 2 whittles the 3000 down to 500, who all win a coveted Google Code Jam T-shirt.  Round 3 takes the 500 down to 25, who win a trip to the Finals.

Here's my Google Code Jam history

2009

• Qualification Round 
• 2467th place
• Round 1A 
• 1278th, not quite enough to move on
• Round 1B 
• 767th, advanced to round 2
• Round 2 
• 1055th, 7 points short of moving on

2010

• Qualification Round 
• 4156th.  I was in the middle of a business trip to London and finished it about 1:15am, so I blame my low finish on that :)
• Round 1A 
• 915th, my time saved me on this one.  I was stumped after solving problem 1, so I just painfully watched my rank drop and hoped it wouldn't break 1000.  If I had been 8:40 later I would have been worse than 1000.
• Round 2
• 1828th.  I felt like I should have advanced this year, but I hit too many problems for which I didn't have a good mathematical understanding.  At least I solved one to get on the board.

I've done a lot of dynamic programming this year, which I feel has been my weakness in the past.  There's usually at least one dynamic programming problem per round, so hopefully that'll give my scores a little bounce.  This year, again, I'll be traveling during the Qualification Round, but at least I'll be closer to my own time zone.