Yr11 Journal 2

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In week 5 and week 6, I participated 2 competitions: GovHack and AIO (Australian Informatics Olympiad)

GovHack

GovHack is a competition where the Australian Government opens its database, and competitors can obtain the data and make a project to demonstrate why data matters.

The team

I was in a team with four Year-12s,

  • Jamie
  • Manindra
  • Daniel
  • Jonte

Our project

We decided to make a project about Blockchain and Cryptocurrency. Manindra downloaded an ethereum blockchain transaction data with a size of 100GB. And then we assigned different part of the project to different project. And the result was I became the frontend developer, and the rest were doing backend.
GriffinCoin

Implemetation

  • The backend was designed to implement blockchain transactions, contracts, and a basic user system. (python)
  • The frontend was designed to implement: (html, css, js, within bootstrap and jquery)
    • homepage which tells the user what the project is about,
    • login/sign up page to lead the user to the user dashboard
    • user dashboard which demonstrates a line graph generated by the previous transaction data
      • transactions section which shows all transactions the user made and at the same time they can create transactions through this page
      • contracts which shows all contracts the user made and also they can create contracts on this page as well

At the end

The competition went 46 hours and it was quite challenging, as I only slept 4 hours in total and I had no food for 18 hours just sitting on my laptop writing codes.

Also it was the first time that I was writing code over a whole night, from 7pm Saturday until 7am Sunday, write frontend and backend codes.

At the end I want to say, this competition is actually quite a challenge, especially for me, because I need to design different pages all by myself, including animations which makes boring static webpage responsive and interesting, also I need to write AJAX that requests the APIs and make accordinate callbacks but it also helps me with a better understanding on frontend workflow.

AIO (Australian Informatics Olympiad)

AIO is a competiton that gives you some questions and you need to write an algorithm for each of them which can colve the question, and return correct output according to the input.

##3# The programming language

I will have to say this is a pain, as I mainly use C#, and it was banned in AIO, the secondary language I use is JavaScript, which was banned as well, at the end I have to use Python, which I’m not that familiar.

But in the practice test it has C# as an option

The questions

The questions were not that hard, there were 6 questions and 3 hours to complete them.

I spent 1 hour finished 3 questions with full mark, and I thought it would be easy and fine, however, it was just the beginning of the nighmare.

At the end

This is ironic, there was a question where I only got 30/100, because my code did not pass two subtasks and the reason was exceed the time limit.

However, my program could run pass test 15 and could not run through test 12, I have no clue why is that as it can run pass more complex tests in time but not the easy one, as I only had appoximately 5 lines of code:

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answer = 0
if N != 3:
    a = S[0:N:3]
    b = S[1:N:3]
    c = S[2:N:3]
    answer = N - max_list(a) - max_list(b) - max_list(c)

and max_list was defined as:

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def max_list(lt):
    temp = 0
    l2 = list(set(lt))
    for i in l2:
        if lt.count(i) > temp:
            temp = lt.count(i)
    return temp

I have no idea why is that, but I will start learning C++ from now on and will be using it next time when doing competitions.

At the end I got 330/600, quite dissapointing because my primary programming languages were banned and some werid issues occured when doing the competition. But it definitely challenged me.