World Programming Championship: mortal boredom (video)

UPD3: You can watch the broadcast here: www.icpc2014.ru/ru/competition/video ; and the closing ceremony here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VzLRDkO3ZU
UPD2: And the winner is the team of St. Petersburg State University (Kunyavsky, Egorov, Suvorov). Our congratulations! :)
UPD: The championship has begun, and the broadcast is already underway! www.icpc2014.ru/ru

Tomorrow, on June 25, 2014, at 08:00 Moscow time, the World Championship on Sports Programming (aka ACM ICPC World Finals) starts in Yekaterinburg. You can watch the live broadcast here: www.icpc2014.ru/ru .
And this post will be devoted to how we turned the far from the most spectacular event (from the point of view of the uninitiated!) Into a cool video broadcast.

What is the World Programming Championships?
The championship is 122 teams of 3 people from universities of the world, a set of algorithmic tasks, 5 hours and one computer per team.
The championship is a call to parents to send children to computer clubs, a signal to schoolchildren about where to go to learn, to achieve, the opportunity for students to build muscles, dragging tables and chairs as volunteers, the chance of the university and the region accepting the Championship, to get their buns from federal structures.
And the Championship is a reason. The reason for all future and current developers, administrators, testers, designers, architects, engineers, and even bydlokodery to look at the biggest fight of young programmers.


ICPC 2014 Trial Tour
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But the trouble is: to still look at it, not being admitted to the competition, was boring and uninteresting. Imagine yourself: a few hundred people on one site are reading pieces of paper and are frantically driving something into the computer.
Approximately such conditions of the problem faced us at the entrance. At the exit it was required to get an interesting (and even better exciting) online broadcast of the Championship. Once we have already coped with this , and therefore with an enthusiasm worthy of a better use, we took on a new, more responsible and complex task.

First of all, we needed journalists. Among developers (and we are just such guys) there is an opinion that the main thing that distinguishes a “professional” journalist is the ability to confuse facts and misinterpret data, which means that it is easier to write all the texts, build a grid of broadcasting, communicate with journalists, and do another thousand and one things. But in this case there is a high risk that we will jeopardize the broadcast, engaging in non-core work. Then (in the name of the broadcast!) We went on an inhuman experiment. We took some PR and journalists of our company and washed their brains: we loaded them with a lot of knowledge about programming, about sports programming, forced them to read Habr and didn’t learn to write code. The output was people who create content that is not only coherent, but actually true.
Together with our new colleagues, we prepared a whole mountain of high-quality material: more than 40 short interviews with interesting people, analysis of tasks, comments about what is happening on the site from experts, video sequences telling about championship rules, its history and funny facts (some of these clips are up to us no one has done yet, despite the championship’s more than forty years history!). And, of course, video from the site.


Video about the rules of the Championship for the seed.

Alas, there is not a single ball at the World Cup programming site that would fly into the goal, not even a couple of strong guys who would periodically beat each other with keyboards. Instead, interesting moments will be randomly scattered in time and space between 122 computers. Record moments of strong emotions will help 10 cameras on the site, 122 webcams and streaming video from each computer . A special team of selected Ekb players from Ekaterinburg will continuously watch all incoming video for five hours and select the best and most interesting moments. Rest assured, they will not miss anything worthwhile. Big brothers are watching them!

By the way, if we are read by teams that will play the championship tomorrow, guys, help us to make the championship more colorful and spectacular: mark each handed task as if it were a goal, and we will immortalize your joy and madness through the ages :)

We tried very hard, did not sleep at night and prepared high-quality content for you. Take the time and join the rare event - the World Championship on Sports Programming 2014


Championship ground. If you look closely, you can see two remote cranes with cameras that will fly over the participants tomorrow: in the left corner of the picture and away in the green stands.

PS: Generally speaking, we have a pessimistic hypothesis that a normal person cannot watch a broadcast for more than twenty minutes. There was a lot of controversy over this, and we are very interested to check whether we are right. So, please, after watching the broadcast, go back and tell us how much did you manage to hold out?

PPS: ACM ICPC World Finals was conceived as a university competition, but it has already become a competition for entire countries. So, cheer for Russia in the World Cup! : D