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“Our team of three contestants are on
our way to ACM ICPC World Finals 2009 in
Stockholm, but there have never been only three
of us in the competition.
To begin, we have Dr Tan Sun Teck organising the
training sessions for team and asking for
sponsorship to see us through our training and
participation in the competition. On some days
that we had training, all three of us were tired
from class, and sometimes the main reason we
came for the practice was a nice burger waiting
for each of us – courtesy of Dr Tan.
It was Dr Tan who gathered the team of dedicated
trainers to help us with our training. We thank
our SoC seniors Steven Halim, Felix Halim, Su
Zhan, Bramandia Ramadhan and Melvin Zhang for
their well-chosen problem sets, solutions and
testing data. We would not have had enough
preparation to make it to the ACM ICPC World
Final without such great effort from our
instructors.
Then there was the bigger group of students from
SoC that shared this hobby of computational
problem solving with us. It would have never
been so much fun if there had been only three
people in the training sessions.
From among the group, we are glad that we three
have met each other and formed a team. All three
of us share a great interest in problem solving,
such that it has become our favourite discussion
topic (besides girls and lectures). We
understand and have grown to take care of each
other. Duc, our team leader, is a tough coder
who provides excellent solution to many
problems, and stays tough in the toughest times
of the rounds of contests. Our other coder is
Tien, who complements Duc on geometry and
brute-force problems. In fact, Tien has been the
coder for more than half of our problems. Tien's
classical guitar music is also a source of joy
for all of us. Phong is the thinker, and the
cook for the whole team at our occasional dinner
get-together. With the strength of each
individual in different areas yet sharing
problem solving as a hobby among many others,
training has been so much fun.
We urge all you avid problem solving fans out
there to take up the ACM ICPC challenge the next
time. You may ask: What if we lack some of those
things you have mentioned? What if we do not
have enough experience? What if we cannot find
enough people to form a team? We say: Come on,
go for what you like, and things will work out
along the way.”
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