C++ – NB

March 27, 2010March 27, 2010

Technosearch & Maffick 2010

My college, MANIT Bhopal, had its tech fest- Technosearch and cultural fest- Maffick from 12th to 16th March 2010. It was a 5 day mega fest with events round the clock which left me exhausted everyday. I participated in a few events with my teammates- Shilpesh Mishra and Nishant Maloo. Here’s an account of the happenings of Technosearch and Maffick 2010 from my perspective

Day 1 : 12th March

Got up early in the morning to do some volunteering work. Had to volunteer for Deal Street and Das Kapital so set up the tables and chairs and prepared the venue for the event. Deal Street was a virtual stock market and Das Kapital was an even that had to do with managing a company for two days. In the morning, I volunteered in the Das Kapital elims and checked the answer papers. After the elims, I volunteered for a while in Deal Street before heading for the first round of Exuberance, a CS-IT event. It wasn’t really a hardcore coding event and had more to do with logic in the first round. After the first round of Exuberance, I headed to the informal desk which was like 2nd home during the 5 days of the fest. Then it was time for the 2nd round of Exuberance which was nice and interesting. It had coding in a new defined pseudo code type language with memory restrictions. Overall, Exuberance was a nice event but we failed to get a podium finish in it. By the time the 2nd round of Exuberance was over, most of the technosearch events for day 1 had ended and then I headed to the football ground for the group dance competition. The group dance ended around 10 pm after which I headed to Modern Skool. Modern Skool, as described, was meant to have games like lucky 7, pen fight, poker, blackjack, UNO. It turned out that everyone was interested just in Poker and other card games and modern skool was transformed into a proper casino. Modern Skool was a very popular event and due to the immense popularity, the organizers, who happen to be my friends were constantly falling short of cards, chips and volunteers to serve as dealers/bankers. So I ended up dealing/volunteering on a table till around 2 am.

Day 2 : 13th March

Got up a little late after a tiring day 1. Had an event (War of Codes) in the afternoon, so spent time at the informal desk before the first round of War of Codes. War of Codes was purely a coding event. The first round was interesting and based on our choice, teams were being alloted a set of 10 questions out of 18 questions with balanced number of coding and debugging problems. We made it to the top 5 of War of Codes and the final round started at 4:30 at the CC. The final round was split into 2 parts- one was a proper coding+debugging round on PCs and other was a round based on the Conway’s game of life that was supposed to be solved on paper. We did very well in the first part and messed up the second part so missed a podium position by a very narrow margin. The finals of War of Codes ended around 9pm as a result of which I missed the Kumar Vishwas ~~night~~ proNITe but no regrets as War of Codes was fun and having a chat with The Cruel Joker was also nice. After that, it was time to head to Modern Skool for some dealing which I did till around 2am.

Day 3 : 14th March

Woke up a bit late again, still feeling tired but knew I had a very empty day ahead with almost nothing to do in the day time. Spent the whole day either at the informal desk or watching other events happen. Events that day included Rube contraption (setup time), CSI (the flagship event of Technosearch) , Stone Age, Treasure hunt and Chaotic times. These were the ones I attended either partially or completely. After a pretty free day, I had a very busy night to worry about. Nocturnal, the overnight coding event was scheduled for 11pm that night. Before that, I attended the rock band competition at the football ground. Nocturnal was an event I had been looking forward to. The event timings were 11pm to 6 am and we were supposed to solve just 2-3 problems. That meant we were in for some lengthy programs and had ample time to think. I reached there at 11pm to find a large number of people already started with the questions. The questions were really nice and challenging and that night at the CC was pure fun 🙂

Night @ the CC. Nocturnal - The overnight coding event

My teammates did a good job by waking me up every time I got a bit drowsy. My team managed to complete two programs till 7:30 am and we were confident about a podium finish. We ended up getting the 2nd position and got a cash prize of Rs2000 🙂 . This part should actually be in Day 4 because it was day 4 by the time nocturnal ended. Switching to day 4 now.

Day 4 : 15th March

Day 4 started with Shilpesh dropping me to my hostel. I was tired after the overnight event but had other stuff to do that day so decided to take just a short nap. As soon as I reached my room, I just laid down on my bed without bothering to change or take off my shoes. The next thing I remember, it was 4:30pm when I woke up 😀 . I slept through all Technosearch events on the day and headed straight to the football ground for the Laser show and fashion show. After the fashion show, next up was, you guessed it right, Modern Skool. Modern Skool was getting bigger everyday. It was the most popular event. We used to fall short of chips every single day. I managed a table completely on day 4 which was the last day for Modern Skool. I went back to the hostel after the end of Modern Skool, one of the most successful events of Maffick 2010.

Day 5 : 16th March

Day 5 had almost nothing to offer. Maffick and Technosearch were originally scheduled to be from 12th to 15th March and the fest was extended by another day as the Kailash Kher night had been postponed by one day. Went straight to the informal desk on that day. The result for War of Codes and Nocturnal were declared on that day. Final rounds of a few events were being conducted in the SAC. After that, it was time for the prize distribution, my favorite part of the fest, specially if I get a prize. The prize distribution marked the end of technosearch and then it was time to hit the football ground for the Kailasa night. Finally the 5 day long fest had ended and I had dinner @ ICH that day.

Overall, it was 5 days of pure fun without a single dull moment. Personally, I’m satisfied with everything the way it was done. Though a week late, I eventually did get my Rs 2000 cash prize 🙂 . This post is getting pretty long, one of the longest on my blog. This took me a couple of sittings to finish writing it. This was technosearch and Maffick from my perspective. That’s all folks!.

September 7, 2009

Noesis 2009

Finally my blog readers get to read a post on my blog. For people wondering where I’ve been all this time, I have no answer except for the fact that I’ve been too busy with college. Hopefully this long post marks the start of frequent posting on my blog.

Noesis 2009 was organized by Vision, the technical society of MANIT Bhopal on 5th and 6th September 2009. It was a two day inter-college mega event. The event consisted of different events addressing different faces of technology. Every department had its own events. The events were-

1.Crime Scene Investigation (General Event)
2.Chem-Zone (Chemical Event)
3.Contrivance (Civil Event)
4.Cryptex and Codecraft (CS and IT event)
5.Didactronics (ECE Event)
6.Ecotecture (Energy Event)
7.Genestein (Bio Informatics Event)
8.Mechatreak (Mechanical Event)
9.Tatva Bodh (MSME Event)
10.Trical Bykes (Electrical and Energy Event)
11.Sci-Tech Quiz
12.War-Zone (Gaming Event)

The events I, being an IT student and a programmer by, was bothered about were CSI, Cryptex and Codecraft. Codecraft was an online submission event. There were around 15 programs to be submitted and I didn’t notice the deadline on time so I didn’t bother submitting the questions. Anant Khaitan (aka GNUger), 3rd year IT bagged the first place in Codecraft. My team managed to get a 2nd place in Cryptex, read on to know the full story.

Here’s a description of Noesis 09 from my perspective-
Noesis was a team participation event. Each team comprised of 3 people and registration fees was Rs 200 per team. I chose two of my good friends and classmates Shilpesh Mishra and Nishant Maloo as my teammates. I, for some reason, had decided that I wasn’t going to look for a winning combination while selecting my teammates so I chose my friends over anyone who could add better value to the team.

Day 1: I reached the registration desk on time and there were loads of people who reached there according to Indian Stretchable Time. The event was bound to get delayed by a couple of hours and it did happen. The day started with a short opening ceremony in the SAC. It was shortly followed by the first event, CSI.

Crime Scene Investigation was an interesting concept, a fun event but I feel it the alloted time wasn’t enough and my team didn’t feel like using our brains early in the morning over solving a murder mystery. I and Shilpesh didn’t take CSI seriously at all. Nishant was comparatively a bit involved in the event. We used the CSI time to have our lunch and gear up for Cryptex which was supposed to be held after lunch at 2:00 PM.

Now it was time for the most important event of Noesis, Cryptex. Cryptex was an event that was designed to test participants in every domain of the CS-IT field. On Day 1, the preliminary rounds of Cryptex were conducted in the SAC. There were 3 rounds on Day 1 of Cryptex. The first round was Techno-tale which was a Cryptography related event. It had a tech crossword and decoding questions too. People in general found round 1 a bit tough and I guess the scores would’ve been pretty close in the round. Round Two was Iconizer which was about identifying logos, tag-lines, pictures. It was extremely easy and the toughest it got was the logo of Debian. I managed to get a great score in that round. Round Three was Conundrums. It was a 75 question quiz that had 70 MCQs and 5 subjective questions related to programming in C, C++, Java and there were questions related to UNIX and Linux. This was supposed to be done in 30 minutes. I manged to do pretty well in this round too. A good question I can recall is

Write a Hello World program without using semicolon

At the end of the 3rd round, we were told that the top 30% teams would qualify for the Second Round of Cryptex. After the preliminary rounds of Cryptex, there was a performance by the college band Paradox and dance performances by the members of the society Roobaroo. It was followed by a Teacher’s Day special event for the teachers. That was all for Day 1 of Noesis. By the end of the day, I was confident of qualifying for the second round and my teammates were more confident than I was :).

Day 2: The first thing we did on day to was to confirm that we had qualified for further rounds. 30 teams had qualified and my team was one of them. For the rest of the teams, an auxiliary event was conducted through which 2 teams were given Wild Card entry to the Grand Finale.

The day 2 main event was Codex. It was a 90 minutes long event completely based on coding. The paper had three sections, the first one had MCQs and objective questions based on coding. A really nice question I remember and could solve was-

Write a fast way to multiply a number by 7 without using * and any loops

There were other output questions including tricky ones like one on the Lexical convention. Section 2 consisted of two programs that were not too tough but not too simple either. Section 3 was a cryptography section that had a long program that was supposed to be understood and we needed to find the input for which the given output would be generated. It was a nice section and I managed to do that one easily. After Codex, the top 5 were supposed to be selected from the 30 shortlisted teams. I had just a slight hope of making it to the Finals. The result of Codex was out at around 1:30 PM and my team had made it to the Finals.

Now it was time for Seven teams to battle it out in the finals of Cryptex at 2:00 PM. The Finale had 2 parts-Testing and Programming and Hardware Trivia. Testing and Programming had 9 questions- 7 questions were testing questions in which we had to check the conditions where the given code would run abnormally or would not perform the desired operation. There were 2 programming questions which were not too tough. The total time alloted for the Finale was 2 hours. Hardware Testing was an interview type round. Teams were called one by one and asked to identify the different parts of a Motherboard. Hardware Trivia was very simple and my team did pretty well.

I attempted almost all questions in the Grand Finale but for some reason, I felt that we weren’t going to get a podium finish. I had a word with other participants but none of them seemed to be confident except for GNUger and his team which everyone predicted would grab the first place. All I had in mind was that I was going to get a certificate for being a finalist. I was having an ice-cream with a friend when the results were announced and I was shocked to hear that my team bagged the second place. That was followed by a very excited me jumping around in public to meet my teammates and celebrate. The third position was bagged by another team from my class- Ayush Agrawal, Prateek Gupta and Amit Gupta. I was considering those guys to be good competition and they didn’t disappoint me. Congrats guys, you did a good job 🙂 .

Then I went to the SAC and saw the finals of the Sci-Tech quiz and a play on Sherlock Holmes waiting for the prize distribution. Finally when it was time for the prize distribution ceremony. My team got a cash prize of Rs 600, two free courses on Ethical Hacking by HCL CDC and a 20% discount coupon on CCNA/Linux by HCL CDC.

Noesis ended up to be a big success in all terms. The participation was high, the events were really good, it was well organized, I had lots of fun and last but not the least, the prizes were nice. In short, I had a great weekend and the credit goes to Noesis.

December 18, 2007July 29, 2009

Computer Practical File In 30 Seconds

It’s December,i.e. Practicals time.I’m sure there are some people who haven’t started making their practical files.I have a quick solution to your problems.I have decided to upload all the C++ programs and SQL questions to be done in the Class 12 Computer Practical file.It’s a 396KB archive which means that you are at max 30 seconds away from the complete file.The archive contains 41 PDF files in 7 folders.

You can download the Class 12 Computer Science Practical File here.

This file can be downloaded about 2500 times a month.In case the link does not work,leave a comment and I’ll give another download link in the next 24 hours.

You can even visit GQ’s C++ Code Archive which is another good place for C++ programs.

So, what are you waiting for?30 seconds is all that you need to earn some valuable marks.Note that you might need to download a PDF reader to view the files if you are a windows user.Here are some good PDF readers-

August 9, 2007

I’M A CODE WARRIOR

In my post titled 3rd AT TECH EDGE I had forgotten to mention a point which GQ had added in his comment.I am now officially a Code Warrior.I wasn’t expecting this at all.The reason being that I didn’t go to BVN with a goal to win or to become a Code Warrior.Ankur had asked me before summer holidays if I was ready to go for a few competitions.I didn’t say anything and he took it as a yes.

Later,Ankur told me that he would send me to a few competitions to gain experience and to get me used to the type of programs I’d have to make in those competitions.I hadn’t done really well at the C.W.Intra.The day I had to go to BVN,I heard Bani Das,the teacher who is in charge of the Code Warriors asking Ankur why he wasn’t sending the two children selected by the Intra.I had a brief thought that this could be my last chance but I knew that with Ankur as the President,my first chance could never be my last chance.

I feels great to be a code warrior.But that also means that I have an additional responsibility.I wanted to make this post short as I’m spending time on C++ graphics which is a must for all competitions.