Episode 37 - Venture Cup

This week's episode of Algorithms Live! features the return of scott_wu. In the episode we discuss his involvement in Venture Cup, the interest of venture capitalists and tech companies in competitive programming, his work as a commentator for this year's Topcoder Open, the relationship of esports to competitive programming, and the problem 626F - Group Projects from the first Venture Cup. Most of the episode is podcast style, so I've included time links in advance to make it is easier to navigate to parts of the discussion that interest you. :)

The episode is available at this link. Enjoy!

Episode 36 - El Toll Caves

This week's episode features Mikhail Tikhomirov (Endagorion). You may know Mikhail from his many problems in Codeforces or other online judges. He has been a finalist of TCO and Google Code Jam and helped host the Barcelona Programming Bootcamp. Mikhail is an ICPC coach for Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology. His teams have earned two gold medals and a silver medal at ACM ICPC World Finals in the past few years. He also has a YouTube channel where he regularly post screencasts.

In this episode we will be discussing his problem El Toll Caves from the Barcelona Bootcamp. This is a math intensive problem with close relationship to the Euclidean algorithm.

If you have any questions for Mikhail, please leave comments on this post with the question or ask the question live during the stream.

See you live! (episode)

Episode 35 - Looking for a Challenge?

This week's episode features Tomasz Idziaszek as a special guest. Tomasz was an ICPC World Finalist from 2005 and a TCO Finalist from 2004-2005. He is an author of over 100 problems, including many hard and interesting problems from Algorithmic Engagements. He was an editor for the polish educational magazine Delta and the famous competitive programming book "Looking for a Challenge?". In 2018 he was a problem setter for the IOI. He also maintains the website http://www.algonotes.com/ that offers interesting educational materials on advanced algorithms.

In this episode we discuss the history behind "Looking for a Challenge?" and his famous problem Termites, which was included in the book. This problem is truly beautiful and I hope many of you will enjoy the episode.

Update: Anyone interested in the getting a copy of the Looking for a Challenge book can find information in this blog post. You can also solve the recommended Woodworms task by seeing the problem statement at this link and on an online judge in this link.