Introduction & Schedule

John Calsbeek, Curt Van Wyk, and myself (Ben Kester) qualified for the World Finals ACM competition.
Since this quite an honor, writing a blog seems fitting. There are a few reasons why I am creating this blog:
- To aid in remembering this experience down the road
- To give family and friends updates on the preparation
- To provide a resource for other teams in preparation
- To notify everyone back home on events of the actual trip.

This will be a rather odd collection of tidbits from our preparations. Many of the posts will probably be rather technical, though not necessarily all them.

Our schedule will be something like the following:
3/28/2009 -- This blog was created!
3/29/2009 -- UVA online competition, "World Finals Warmup I" (9 AM CDT)
4/5/2009 -- UVA online competition, "World Finals Warmup II" (3 AM CDT)
4/18/2009 -- Arrive in Sweden
4/21/2009 -- Competition from 9:30 - 3:00 (2:30 - 8:00 AM CDT)!
4/22/2009 -- Return to the States

Resources:
http://cm2prod.baylor.edu/ICPCWiki/Wiki.jsp?page=World%20Final%20Schedule%20of%20Events -- Schedule of events for the world competition
http://icpcres.ecs.baylor.edu/onlinejudge/ -- UVA online judge (lets you practice problems online, offers competitions)
http://acm.uva.es/board/ -- forum for UVA online judge (a great reasource if you get stuck on a problem)
http://www.catonmat.net/tag/algorithms -- MIT algorithms class lecture videos and notes
Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual by Steven R. Skiena and Miguel A. Revilla