Solution for ACM-ICPC world finals 2015 Problem B : Asteroids

So, as promised I am back with the another installment of solution which is for  ACM-ICPC world finals 2015 Problem B : Asteroids. This is done in the so-called Object Oriented manner. Unfortunately it does not converge with the requirement of answer as per input sample set 1 i.e. 4.19358 instead, it gives 4.17699. We've calculated Centroid, Area, Apothem, Side and so on. To detect the maximum overlapped area we have considered the distance between the centroids of these polygons. The code may be found at the github link.

Solution for ACM-ICPC world finals 2015 Problem A : Amalgamated Artichokes

Upon recent completion of ACM-ICPC world finals 2015, an interesting result of participating institutes is available at: http://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results. A list of problems is available at: http://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/problems/icpc2015.pdf.

The challenge requires the solution in C, C++ or JAVA I thought to give a try to the one of my personal favourite i.e. Python. I shall try to put solutions on this blog. So here comes solution to Problem A : Amalgamated Artichokes

Using Arduino Analog Pins to Interact with LCD

Following the arduino tutorial, http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/AnalogInputPins it was quite clear that the Analog Pins can be used as its Digital counterpart. Except with a little different way of identification, i.e. prefixing the respective Analog pin with the character 'A' (A for Analog). 

The significance of this feature was overlooked until recently I desperately needed numerous digital pins, and I ran out of them on my Arduino (Atmega328) clone to drive Hitachi HD44780 compatible LCD. 

People suggested to use shift registers or I2C backpack etc., though, I wanted something more simpler and ultimately following the below mentioned tweaking, I got the LCD up and running using Analog pins. No rocket science, but felt happy, as I had saved my pocket from the extra expenses!!!

Display	Original	Our Experiment
RS	12	A0
RW	GND	GND
EN	11	A1
D4	5	A2
D5	4	A3
D6	3	A4
D7	2	A5

At the same time the code needs to be slightly changed, shown as below.

// Replace LiquidCrystal lcd(12, 11, 5, 4, 3, 2); with

LiquidCrystal lcd(A0, A1, A2, A3, A4, A5);

This shall use all Analog pins, though, the user is spared with all digital pins free, if the it is the sketch's demand .

A Dream Undergrad Computing Institute

At last we had weekend that we termed as a creative one. The reader may find it even crazy on reading this blog-post further! Me and @Devji were thinking about a dream institute offering an undergraduate program in Computing.

We imagined one of those all time great people teaching a course of their respective specialisation in this institute. Later on Sunday i.e. today was spent in crunching for more people in this institute. Check the below mentioned image out and comment for modifications if any.

Sr.	Position	Position Held By
1.	Principal Director	Prof. Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
2.	Research Director (Software Projects)	Prof. Andrew S. Tanenbaum
3.	Research Director (Hardware Projects)	Mr. Steve Wozniak
4.	Laboratory Coordinator	Prof. Ken Thompson
5.	Laboratory Assistant	Mr. Linus Torvalds/ Mr. Bram Cohen
Sr.	Course	Taught By
1.	Mathematics	Prof. Srinivas Ramanujan
2.	Technical Communication for Computing Science	Prof. Donald E. Knuth/ Prof. Tim Berners-Lee
3.	Computer Architecture	Prof. John von Neumann/ Prof. Seymour Cray
4.	Theory of Computing	Prof. Alan Turing
5.	Algorithms	Prof. Ronald Rivest
6.	Operating Systems	Prof. Denis Ritchie/ Prof. Rob Pike
7.	Compiler Design	Prof. Brian Kernighan/ Prof. James Gosling
8.	Object Oriented Programming	Prof. Bjarne Stroustrup
9.	Computer Networks	Prof. Leonard Kleinrock
10.	Database Systems	Prof. Edgar F. Codd
11.	Artificial Intelligence	Prof. John McCarthy

Missing dmr!!

(Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie)

dmr - Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie silently left this world on October 12, 2011. Internet fraternity came to know about this sad news through Rob Pike's google+ status. Though, people were still overwhelmed by the Steve-mourning phenomena on different social networking sites. dmr has left a strong and unavoidable legacy of UNIX and C. We will really miss you Dennis for all these, you were, are and will be counted as one of the fathers of computing! Rest In Peace dmr.

Nostalgic Devices!

After more than two and a half years, very abruptly I am back to the Blogger dashboard. The Dussera holiday began with the hot saffron flavored Jalebies however, there were a sad news of the demise of Steve Jobs.

Coincidentally, these days I am reading iWoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith a late-birthday gift by a student turned friend turned colleague Prof. Devji Chhanga.

This text reminded me of my memories of the past. I try to enlist those devices, which I have had a chance ever to work with.

CASIO FX 795P

CASIO FX 880P

BBC Micro

AMD 100 MGHz DX/4

So beautiful were those days! I thank my dad and my historic high school Alfred High School for allowing me the access to all these and I also thank the image-sources for the post.

The Grid Approach Towards Fighting Swine Flu

It has been unanimously agreed that Computational Grids are proven tool for complex and resource consuming computational challenges. It is evident that these challenges need not to be a routine laboratory experiment always.

Today's one of the similar challenge for the human race is to fight against the pandemic Swine Flue or Influenza H1N1. An adorable initiative has been started to delegate and utilize the idle computational cycles of voluntary contributor computers to find the best matching chemical compounds to fight against the virus.

For more information the visitor is requested to visit http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/flu1/viewFlu1Main.do . Even you can contribute in this and other projects that are helpful for the entire human race, just by downloading a small program and voluntarily contributing the idle computational cycles of your computer from http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/reg/viewRegister.do .