Programming World Cup: mortal boredom (video)

    UPD3: Recording of the broadcast can be viewed here: www.icpc2014.ru/ru/competition/video ; and the closing ceremony is here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VzLRDkO3ZU
    UPD2: And the winner is the team of St. Petersburg State University (Kunyavsky, Egorov, Suvorov). Our congratulations! :)
    UPD: The championship has begun, and the broadcast is already underway! www.icpc2014.ru/ru

    Tomorrow, June 25, 2014 at 08:00 Moscow time, the World Programming Championship (aka ACM ICPC World Finals) starts in Yekaterinburg. You can watch the live broadcast here: www.icpc2014.ru/ru .
    And this post will be devoted to how we turned the far from the most spectacular event (from the point of view of the uninitiated!) Into a cool video broadcast.

    What is a sports programming world championship?
    The championship is 122 teams of 3 people from universities in the world, a set of algorithmic tasks, 5 hours and one computer per team.
    The Championship is an appeal to parents to send their children to computer circles, a signal to schoolchildren about where to go to study to achieve, an opportunity for students to build muscle by dragging tables and chairs as volunteers, a chance for the university and the region hosting the Championship to get their buns from federal structures.
    And the Championship is an occasion. An occasion to all future and current developers, admins, testers, designers, architects, engineers, and even bydlokoderam to look at the biggest battle of young programmers.


    ICPC Trial Tour 2014

    Yes, the trouble is: to still look at it without being involved in the competition was boring and uninteresting. Imagine for yourself: several hundred people at one site read pieces of paper and drive something feverishly into a computer.
    About such conditions of the problem were before us at the entrance. The output required to get an interesting (and even better exciting) online broadcast of the Championship. Once we already dealt with similar, and therefore, with enthusiasm worthy of a better application, they took up a new, more responsible and difficult task.

    First of all, we needed journalists. Among the developers (and we are just such guys) there is an opinion that the main thing that distinguishes a “professional” journalist is the ability to confuse facts and interpret data, which makes it easier to write all the texts yourself, to build a gridlayout of the broadcast, communicate with reporters, and do another thousand and one things. But in this case, the risk is high that we will jeopardize the broadcast by engaging in non-core work. Then (in the name of broadcast!) We went to an inhuman experiment. We took several PR managers and journalists of our company and brainwashed them: we loaded a lot of knowledge about programming, sports programming into them, forced them to read the Habr and unless we were taught to write code. The output was people who create content that is not only connected, but also actually true.
    Together with our new associates, we prepared a whole mountain of high-quality material: more than 40 short interviews with interesting people, a discussion of tasks, comments on what is happening on the site from experts, video inserts telling about the championship rules, its history and funny facts (some of these videos are before us no one has done yet, despite more than forty years of championship history!). And, of course, the video from the site.


    A video about the Championship rules for seed.

    Alas, there is not a single ball at the programming World Cup that flies into the goal, there are not even a couple of strong guys who would periodically beat each other with keyboards. Instead, interesting points will be randomly scattered in time and space between 122 computers. 10 moments on the site, 122 webcams and streaming video from each computer will help to capture moments of strong emotions . A special team of selected acm workers from Yekaterinburg will continuously watch all incoming video for five hours and select the best and most interesting moments. Rest assured, they will not lose anything worthwhile. Big brothers are watching them!

    By the way, if we are read by the teams that will play the championship tomorrow, guys, help us make the championship more colorful and spectacular: mark every task passed as if it were a goal, and we will perpetuate your joy and madness for centuries :)

    We tried very hard , did not sleep at night and prepared quality content for you. Take your time and get involved in a rare event - the 2014 World Sports Programming Championship Championship


    venue. If you look closely, you will notice two remote cranes with cameras that will fly over the participants tomorrow: in the left corner of the picture and far in the green stands.

    PS: Generally speaking, we have a pessimistic hypothesis that a normal person cannot watch a broadcast for more than twenty minutes. There was a lot of controversy about this, and we are very interested to check whether we are right. So please, after watching the broadcast, come back and tell us how much you managed to hold out?

    PPS: ACM ICPC World Finals was conceived as a university competition, but has already turned into a competition of entire countries. So, we support Russia at the World Cup! : D
    List of Russian teams
    • Izhevsk State Technical University (Smirnov, Burlakov, Sutygin),
    • Moscow State Institute of Steel and Alloys (Kofman, Ovchinkin, Lopukhov),
    • Moscow State University (Pyaderkin, Evstropov, Omelyanenko),
    • Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (Mashrabov, Rukhovich, Chebanov),
    • National Research University Higher School of Economics (Alipov, Kolupaev, Kouprin),
    • Novosibirsk State University (Beloshapko, Zaytcev, Stenenko),
    • Petrozavodsk State University (Ioffe, Shapovalov, Filev),
    • St. Petersburg State University (Kunyavskiy, Egorov, Suvorov),
    • St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (Vasilyev, Bardashevich, Minaev),
    • Saratov State University (Agapov, Fefer, Kudasov),
    • Ural Federal University (Mukhametianov, Merkurev, Krasnoselskikh).

    Only registered users can participate in the survey. Please come in.

    How many minutes of broadcast did you stand? :)

    • 62.8% I could not stand even five minutes of this tediousness. 242
    • 7% Looked for ten minutes of boredom. 27
    • 6.4% I am strong-willed: 20 minutes of viewing. 25
    • 23.6% Damn it guys not so bad! 91

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