Speed coding at the Harker Programming Invitational today
We learned that my son’s team was accepted last night, but we did not know what the contest was about. The challenge round afforded a half hour to program a solution to this problem: given an arbitrary tic-tac-toe board (partially played), calculate if X can win. The rules are like normal tic-tac-toe, except that 3-in-a-row loses the game. To win the challenge round, a submitted program has to be correct for several test cases, not known in advance.
For most of the contests, it is a team effort, but when my son heard the challenge task, he said “I got this” and flipped the keyboard into Dvorak mode for speed typing. He went from blank screen to a Java-coded solution in 10 minutes flat.
None of the other teams completed the task in the half-hour window, so the organizers had to extend the contest by an extra 10 minutes to find second and third place winners.
So proud of him! When in a state of flow, he codes about 3x faster than I can type simple English.
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