11 reasons to never undertake to hold an international programming championship
In the life of any person, a noble irrevocable decision can happen to inflict irreparable good on the world (or on a small subset of it) by organizing some cool programming championship.
For example, take a local championship according to the rules of ACM ICPC, gather all the cool teams of Russia, invite five teams of the World Championship finalists from Russia and China, hold the main tour of 70 teams, add the Battle of Giants to it, organize a video broadcast, and even cover this matter in the press.
What if such a desire has awakened and is now burning in the chest with fire? Start by reading this article, and if you're lucky, the flame will subside.
Disclaimer We still organized such a championship, you can read about it in detail here . All items are real, any coincidences with real people and organizations are premeditated.
')
1. You can not collect the right amount of money. Not a single possible company sponsor in a sober mind and sound memory would ever agree to lower a lot of money for some reason. And even if it agrees, there will not be many such companies. And if there are a lot of them, then the money is still not enough. (Holivar on whether the ACM business can be deployed under this post, by the way).
Of course, it can be very handy here, that the largest company in the region has long and reliably supported all types of activities in the field of CS and SE, and also that there is an abstract IT community in your region, which knows how to beat the state’s money for such events. But get ready to become a person who will assume the quenching of a burning vent of bureaucracy, statements, checks, payments, contracts. In this case, as in the movie about the asteroid and Bruce Willis: someone must sacrifice himself to save everyone.
2. Have you figured out who of your team you will give to the mercy of money questions? So, he will return revenge. It turns out that in order to use the money of the state, it is not enough to collect a ton of paperwork, you also have to spend money in a certain way: for example, you can buy a printer only on the first working day of the new quarter, if it falls on the full moon.
In our case, all the money had to be spent only on ONE cost item and declare a tender for it, which Vasya Pupkin could well win with an iPhone instead of a cool video camera and a voice recorder instead of a dozen microphones.
If up to this point you were a good organizer, and you made sure that all large expenses were committed in advance, so that the jambs did not happen, then congratulations, you are at an impasse.
3. You also need a platform for the championship! The computer classes of the university, of course, will not suit you: there is no scope, there is no chic, there is no place to hang the flags of Russia and China during the Battle of the Giants!
And then you will begin to look for: an inexpensive (see point 1), pretentious and capacious site. It quickly becomes clear that there are either no such premises in the city at all or not at all.
Well, maybe with the exception of university sites and government agencies. Suppose, miraculously, your city is claiming to hold ACM ICPC World Finals 2014, and everyone is completely loyal to sports programming. So polls that they offer you a platform! To the best of pompous, completely free, quite capacious - in general, the ultimate dream.
So it seemed to us that everything is fine.
4. Don't misunderstand, we love our university very much, and are really grateful for providing the site, but the mouth of the bureaucracy, which I mentioned earlier, is expanding significantly. Even with the availability of experienced fighters seals and signatures.
A simple example that you can wait.
Want tables from stock? Worker!
Do you want to bring a printer to the site? Worker!
The printer broke on the weekend during the competition, and you want to bring a new one? Worker! But only 3 days ago!
5. And if you overlook this, then at the last moment something like this may arise, which later on codeforces will be remembered for the next years with 500 catchwords. For example, a university canteen, in which you wanted to feed all participants with food from a third-party organization and with which, it seemed, everything was in order, it might not be remembered that two months ago you agreed on something there, and now you have nowhere to hold lunches , dinners and other meals.
It sounds not so bad, because, in fact, you just need to find another platform, but in reality, believe me, before the competition, in a state of stress, when there is a lot of other work ... In general, nothing pleasant.
Disclaimer If anything, it's only our fault - not to fix in advance the documented relationship with the dining room. But this is not easier.
6. In the appendage to the site you will need computers. N identical computers by the number of teams. The same number of monitors and mice that do not differ from each other. If you suddenly differ - participants will eat you. And in your city can not find so many identical computers. Vendors of technology do not see any reason to support ACM. In general, everything is very bad.
We, by the way, did not solve this problem and offered participants to bring their own computers and laptops.
7. Do you think the problems with the site have ended? No matter how wrong! Our team had managers, mathematicians, programmers, former acm-players, novice acm-boxes, even girl's acm-boxes, but none of us, NONE of us, ever knew what amps the wires melt, how much power does n computers need, it is necessary to distribute power between the shields. Even those guys who preached assembler and compulsory knowledge of networks for mathematicians did not know this :)
You will have to learn to understand this, communicate with electricians in different organizations and make absolutely idiotic decisions about switching the camera from one outlet to an outlet 50 centimeters higher, because according to the scheme (which you can still get) you go to different shields.
8. There will be a lot of minor problems on the site (such as curtains hanging 5 meters high), but let's finally get away from them and go back to the wonderful world of programming.
After all, you have somewhere to get sets of tasks. Miraculously, the Poles will agree to prepare a set of tasks for the Battle of the Giants. But there is still the main tour. It can be charged only to the most responsible veterans of the movement, who have long established themselves. And even pay them money for the preparation of tasks.
Then, of course, at 6 in the morning (the championship starts at 10), they will authoritatively reassure you that in just two tasks there is not a single test, and all the others are almost ready.
Surprisingly, even in spite of this, we had to make only one regiaj in our championship, and he almost did not touch anyone. Looks like our veterans are really very experienced.
9. Well, ok, somehow you will get out from item 8. Item number 9 is about ambitions. Do you want to cool the championship? So it is necessary, as in the final, to give balls for solved problems. We will not discuss where to get these balls, honestly, it is not difficult. Well, most often.
So, the balls should be distributed by someone, tied. For example, volunteers. By the way, there is also a lot of small work that someone has to do. Well, for example, volunteers.
Implement your mania for managing people! Let the volunteers, like puppets in your hands, fluttering around the hall, carrying the balls, pasting the windows, setting the tables, sizing the wires on the floor! ..
Just try to figure out in advance where these volunteers will take, how to motivate them to do something, who will watch them, how you will force them to do work as they please. In general, get ready to feel on the ship with a team prone to rebellion and slovenliness.
10. Approaching the participants closely. Do you still want an international championship? :)
How much time is a visa for children from China? And how many Poles? What do you need to get a visa? And where does all this get? Brrr. International politics on the march. There is even nothing to warn about, except that it is necessary to start to engage in all this nonsense in advance. At least a couple of months. Even better - in six months. Ideal - for the year.
11. Basically, the possible fails were placed to reduce, and you probably could feel how the author's fighting ardor fades away. Well, this is because we left the sweetest at the very end.
If you remember, you still would like to make a video broadcast of the championship. This item is so beautiful in its saturation of problems that you can write a separate article about it. I will try to limit myself to smaller volumes.
Have you ever seen a video cable 3 cm thick? And saw that the entire corridor was strewn with such cables? Do you know that it takes 20 hours to deploy these cables (and all video systems associated with them)? And this is even under the condition that the basic equipment is simply already assembled inside two hefty trucks, which will simply drive up to the building and be ready to work. And you still have to reconcile the power engineers, security guards, the team of the video studio and the presenter.
Well, suppose you have shown miracles of coordination, no one has fought, the video has been deployed - everything is fine. Answer a short question - what will you show in your video broadcast?
How do students 5 hours bang on the keys? Damn it, this is the sight that I always wanted to see! 5 hours I will keep an eye on how unknown guys solve problems for me, peering hard at the monitor, then at the conditions of the tasks. In general, it is boring. True, boring. Unreal boring.
We solve this question. You will need 2 weeks and a team of 10 people who will shoot and mount 2 hours of dynamic videos about your city, university, championship, etc. etc. (By the way, the video about the ACM rules is voiced by the same voice as the “scandalous truths”, it seems that it turned out quite well, the organizers of the World Cup in St. Petersburg even took it to themselves in the video broadcast)
It remains 3 hours. Load your pr-manager! All you need is to find 20 people willing to give interviews, ring them, convince them to participate, compile them an exemplary text of the interview ... And also organize a studio to record the interview and convince the presenter to talk about the topic. Delov something!
After that, you still have an hour of time. A brilliant solution - call another host, organize a flash zone, where you will take random people to say something about the championship (well, do not forget to make a list of these random people in advance).
I almost forgot. A couple of days before the championship, the video studio will have the opportunity to withdraw the award. Between the end of the championship and rewarding you have in terms of an hour of time, which must be filled with something. Well, you have a couple more nights ahead, there is time.
And the plan has been made, the broadcast is on, everything is fine. Suddenly something unexpected will happen. Well, for example, purely hypothetically, one of the key people in the broadcast will start to drink something from the flask, carefully brought with them, with each sip more and more failing.
Cool? Well, this is not the end.
At the closing, it turns out that in a rush to one of the two rollers the sound was not screwed up, and then the DJ accidentally pulled the wires from the console, and the sound disappeared, and then the closing speaker starts talking too slowly, the video studio decides that the closing is already taking too long, and completely cut off the broadcast 5 minutes before the announcement of the results of the match Russia - China, which is waiting for the entire RuNet.
I want to swear and beat my head against the wall.
But this is not the finish. Suppose you have prepared a broadcast for so long and with high quality that you are completely confident and even inform Bill Poucher ( head of ACM ICPC ) about your competitions and what would be great if the link to the broadcast was posted on the main page of ACM ICPC and Bill agrees. You even hire synchronists who will voice the broadcast! You inform Chinese universities about the broadcast! You agree in advance with the broadcast site that you will be watched all over the world!
And then the ip site will chop off all the connections to your broadcast from other countries except Russia. Checkmate, expensive ACM-community, to hell with you, and not broadcast.
In fact, there are still a lot of smaller problems, for example, printing souvenirs, coffee breaks, meeting participants at airports and train stations, dozens of taxis, buses, a buffet table, which may not have enough food.
But to us all this no longer seems really difficult.
I hope that with this article I saved someone from the idea, which was detrimental to his nerves, to organize international championships.
If not saved, and you still want to do it - call. We liked to deal with all this, and, most importantly, we learned how to do it effectively :)
PS: By the way, as an advertisement, tomorrow starts ACM ICPC World Finals 2013 in St. Petersburg. We can only sympathize with them :), because they have even more such problems.
For example, take a local championship according to the rules of ACM ICPC, gather all the cool teams of Russia, invite five teams of the World Championship finalists from Russia and China, hold the main tour of 70 teams, add the Battle of Giants to it, organize a video broadcast, and even cover this matter in the press.
What if such a desire has awakened and is now burning in the chest with fire? Start by reading this article, and if you're lucky, the flame will subside.
Disclaimer We still organized such a championship, you can read about it in detail here . All items are real, any coincidences with real people and organizations are premeditated.
')
1. You can not collect the right amount of money. Not a single possible company sponsor in a sober mind and sound memory would ever agree to lower a lot of money for some reason. And even if it agrees, there will not be many such companies. And if there are a lot of them, then the money is still not enough. (Holivar on whether the ACM business can be deployed under this post, by the way).
Of course, it can be very handy here, that the largest company in the region has long and reliably supported all types of activities in the field of CS and SE, and also that there is an abstract IT community in your region, which knows how to beat the state’s money for such events. But get ready to become a person who will assume the quenching of a burning vent of bureaucracy, statements, checks, payments, contracts. In this case, as in the movie about the asteroid and Bruce Willis: someone must sacrifice himself to save everyone.
2. Have you figured out who of your team you will give to the mercy of money questions? So, he will return revenge. It turns out that in order to use the money of the state, it is not enough to collect a ton of paperwork, you also have to spend money in a certain way: for example, you can buy a printer only on the first working day of the new quarter, if it falls on the full moon.
In our case, all the money had to be spent only on ONE cost item and declare a tender for it, which Vasya Pupkin could well win with an iPhone instead of a cool video camera and a voice recorder instead of a dozen microphones.
If up to this point you were a good organizer, and you made sure that all large expenses were committed in advance, so that the jambs did not happen, then congratulations, you are at an impasse.
3. You also need a platform for the championship! The computer classes of the university, of course, will not suit you: there is no scope, there is no chic, there is no place to hang the flags of Russia and China during the Battle of the Giants!
And then you will begin to look for: an inexpensive (see point 1), pretentious and capacious site. It quickly becomes clear that there are either no such premises in the city at all or not at all.
Well, maybe with the exception of university sites and government agencies. Suppose, miraculously, your city is claiming to hold ACM ICPC World Finals 2014, and everyone is completely loyal to sports programming. So polls that they offer you a platform! To the best of pompous, completely free, quite capacious - in general, the ultimate dream.
So it seemed to us that everything is fine.
4. Don't misunderstand, we love our university very much, and are really grateful for providing the site, but the mouth of the bureaucracy, which I mentioned earlier, is expanding significantly. Even with the availability of experienced fighters seals and signatures.
A simple example that you can wait.
Want tables from stock? Worker!
Do you want to bring a printer to the site? Worker!
The printer broke on the weekend during the competition, and you want to bring a new one? Worker! But only 3 days ago!
5. And if you overlook this, then at the last moment something like this may arise, which later on codeforces will be remembered for the next years with 500 catchwords. For example, a university canteen, in which you wanted to feed all participants with food from a third-party organization and with which, it seemed, everything was in order, it might not be remembered that two months ago you agreed on something there, and now you have nowhere to hold lunches , dinners and other meals.
It sounds not so bad, because, in fact, you just need to find another platform, but in reality, believe me, before the competition, in a state of stress, when there is a lot of other work ... In general, nothing pleasant.
Disclaimer If anything, it's only our fault - not to fix in advance the documented relationship with the dining room. But this is not easier.
6. In the appendage to the site you will need computers. N identical computers by the number of teams. The same number of monitors and mice that do not differ from each other. If you suddenly differ - participants will eat you. And in your city can not find so many identical computers. Vendors of technology do not see any reason to support ACM. In general, everything is very bad.
We, by the way, did not solve this problem and offered participants to bring their own computers and laptops.
7. Do you think the problems with the site have ended? No matter how wrong! Our team had managers, mathematicians, programmers, former acm-players, novice acm-boxes, even girl's acm-boxes, but none of us, NONE of us, ever knew what amps the wires melt, how much power does n computers need, it is necessary to distribute power between the shields. Even those guys who preached assembler and compulsory knowledge of networks for mathematicians did not know this :)
You will have to learn to understand this, communicate with electricians in different organizations and make absolutely idiotic decisions about switching the camera from one outlet to an outlet 50 centimeters higher, because according to the scheme (which you can still get) you go to different shields.
8. There will be a lot of minor problems on the site (such as curtains hanging 5 meters high), but let's finally get away from them and go back to the wonderful world of programming.
After all, you have somewhere to get sets of tasks. Miraculously, the Poles will agree to prepare a set of tasks for the Battle of the Giants. But there is still the main tour. It can be charged only to the most responsible veterans of the movement, who have long established themselves. And even pay them money for the preparation of tasks.
Then, of course, at 6 in the morning (the championship starts at 10), they will authoritatively reassure you that in just two tasks there is not a single test, and all the others are almost ready.
Surprisingly, even in spite of this, we had to make only one regiaj in our championship, and he almost did not touch anyone. Looks like our veterans are really very experienced.
9. Well, ok, somehow you will get out from item 8. Item number 9 is about ambitions. Do you want to cool the championship? So it is necessary, as in the final, to give balls for solved problems. We will not discuss where to get these balls, honestly, it is not difficult. Well, most often.
So, the balls should be distributed by someone, tied. For example, volunteers. By the way, there is also a lot of small work that someone has to do. Well, for example, volunteers.
Implement your mania for managing people! Let the volunteers, like puppets in your hands, fluttering around the hall, carrying the balls, pasting the windows, setting the tables, sizing the wires on the floor! ..
Just try to figure out in advance where these volunteers will take, how to motivate them to do something, who will watch them, how you will force them to do work as they please. In general, get ready to feel on the ship with a team prone to rebellion and slovenliness.
10. Approaching the participants closely. Do you still want an international championship? :)
How much time is a visa for children from China? And how many Poles? What do you need to get a visa? And where does all this get? Brrr. International politics on the march. There is even nothing to warn about, except that it is necessary to start to engage in all this nonsense in advance. At least a couple of months. Even better - in six months. Ideal - for the year.
11. Basically, the possible fails were placed to reduce, and you probably could feel how the author's fighting ardor fades away. Well, this is because we left the sweetest at the very end.
If you remember, you still would like to make a video broadcast of the championship. This item is so beautiful in its saturation of problems that you can write a separate article about it. I will try to limit myself to smaller volumes.
Have you ever seen a video cable 3 cm thick? And saw that the entire corridor was strewn with such cables? Do you know that it takes 20 hours to deploy these cables (and all video systems associated with them)? And this is even under the condition that the basic equipment is simply already assembled inside two hefty trucks, which will simply drive up to the building and be ready to work. And you still have to reconcile the power engineers, security guards, the team of the video studio and the presenter.
Well, suppose you have shown miracles of coordination, no one has fought, the video has been deployed - everything is fine. Answer a short question - what will you show in your video broadcast?
How do students 5 hours bang on the keys? Damn it, this is the sight that I always wanted to see! 5 hours I will keep an eye on how unknown guys solve problems for me, peering hard at the monitor, then at the conditions of the tasks. In general, it is boring. True, boring. Unreal boring.
We solve this question. You will need 2 weeks and a team of 10 people who will shoot and mount 2 hours of dynamic videos about your city, university, championship, etc. etc. (By the way, the video about the ACM rules is voiced by the same voice as the “scandalous truths”, it seems that it turned out quite well, the organizers of the World Cup in St. Petersburg even took it to themselves in the video broadcast)
It remains 3 hours. Load your pr-manager! All you need is to find 20 people willing to give interviews, ring them, convince them to participate, compile them an exemplary text of the interview ... And also organize a studio to record the interview and convince the presenter to talk about the topic. Delov something!
After that, you still have an hour of time. A brilliant solution - call another host, organize a flash zone, where you will take random people to say something about the championship (well, do not forget to make a list of these random people in advance).
I almost forgot. A couple of days before the championship, the video studio will have the opportunity to withdraw the award. Between the end of the championship and rewarding you have in terms of an hour of time, which must be filled with something. Well, you have a couple more nights ahead, there is time.
And the plan has been made, the broadcast is on, everything is fine. Suddenly something unexpected will happen. Well, for example, purely hypothetically, one of the key people in the broadcast will start to drink something from the flask, carefully brought with them, with each sip more and more failing.
Cool? Well, this is not the end.
At the closing, it turns out that in a rush to one of the two rollers the sound was not screwed up, and then the DJ accidentally pulled the wires from the console, and the sound disappeared, and then the closing speaker starts talking too slowly, the video studio decides that the closing is already taking too long, and completely cut off the broadcast 5 minutes before the announcement of the results of the match Russia - China, which is waiting for the entire RuNet.
I want to swear and beat my head against the wall.
But this is not the finish. Suppose you have prepared a broadcast for so long and with high quality that you are completely confident and even inform Bill Poucher ( head of ACM ICPC ) about your competitions and what would be great if the link to the broadcast was posted on the main page of ACM ICPC and Bill agrees. You even hire synchronists who will voice the broadcast! You inform Chinese universities about the broadcast! You agree in advance with the broadcast site that you will be watched all over the world!
And then the ip site will chop off all the connections to your broadcast from other countries except Russia. Checkmate, expensive ACM-community, to hell with you, and not broadcast.
In fact, there are still a lot of smaller problems, for example, printing souvenirs, coffee breaks, meeting participants at airports and train stations, dozens of taxis, buses, a buffet table, which may not have enough food.
But to us all this no longer seems really difficult.
I hope that with this article I saved someone from the idea, which was detrimental to his nerves, to organize international championships.
If not saved, and you still want to do it - call. We liked to deal with all this, and, most importantly, we learned how to do it effectively :)
PS: By the way, as an advertisement, tomorrow starts ACM ICPC World Finals 2013 in St. Petersburg. We can only sympathize with them :), because they have even more such problems.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/185054/
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