HSCTF

I am a science player in Quiz Bowl, and as nationals is under a week away, this week I will be making no progress on any computer science projects. I am done with HSCTF, and am not in the middle of any major projects. This summer, I plan to revive the LASA Quiz Bowl database, hosting it on my raspberry pi. I will also take another look at all of my simulators, and make upgrades to make them more aesthetically pleasing as well as add bounds to prevent lag from loading too many objects. HSCTF just ended, so I will discuss how I solved a problem. The first haystack problem was implemented via a Markov chain, and it contained a large amount of algorithm generated text. As the text was algorithm generated, it was very repetitive, but too long to search through via human means. What I did is write a little bit of Java code: I took the first five words from each line and inserted them into a TreeMap with a value of true. Every time my TreeMap contained the key that I was trying to add, I set the value from true to false. After that, I would print the first five lines of every line that has a value of true. This would print every line where the first five words were unique. This only gave me around 10 to 15 lines, so it was trivial to read them all and find the line that contained the key. I have been busy preparing for HSNCT, so I did not get very far in HSCTF, but I had a lot of fun solving various problems.