Bangladesh Experience - Part I

Wow...I just realized it has been almost a month I have not blogged. Sorry people. As many of you know I brought a team of our students to the Regional Contest of the ACM International Collegate Programming Competition (ACM-ICPC) at Dhaka, Bangladesh from Sept 21, 2005 to Sept 24, 2005. We were given a short notice of 3 weeks to get ourselves organized, obtained the passport and visa for the team etc. and trying to have a little training (hardly any due to the short time constraints), thus I was very busy and just could not find any time to blog. After returning from Bangladesh on Sunday Sept 25, 2005, I got a little sick (even until now) and on Wednesday Sept 28, 2005 I flew to Penang to visit our industrial training students and just came back yesterday late night (Sept 30,2005). What a busy month!

To blog about an oversea trip is not easy especially if you visited a lot of places and have a lot of experience to share. I went to Beijing, China at the end of July and i mentioned I will blog about it! In fact, I have started writing the blog right after I came back, but unfortunately I have only completed about 20% as there are just too many things to share, hopefully i will be able to find more time to do so before my memory about the trip slowly faded away!

As for the Bangladesh trip, thank goodness, Gordon has already blogged about it, so it would save me a lot of headache writing it. So i would like to refer you to his blog as follows:

• Mission Codename: BAB
• Blog @ Bangla I
• Blog @ Bangla II
• Blog @ Bangla III
• Blog @ Bangla IV

Thanks Whale!

So, without repeating what he has already written, I would like to just add below a few comments and thoughts about the trip, as well as to share a few photos.

ACM International Collegate Programming Competition (ACM-ICPC) is a annual contest for university students to test their problem solving programming skills. The competition is held in rounds very much like world soccer, to participate in the World Finals, a team would need to win in a Regional Contest. There are a few Asia Regional Contest site, we choose to go to Dhaka (in Bangladesh) site as we were invited over there as special guests and all our local travels and acomodations were being paid for by the Dhaka Organizer, IBM Malaysia sponsored us our air tickets!

The questions were really tough for our team, you can download the problem set HERE. We went there knowing very well that we will do rather badly due to the short notice and lack of training, in contrast, the World Champion (Jai Tong University, Shanghai, China) last year had 10 hours of training per day, and our team didn't even have 10 hours of training in total! Furthermore, 2 of our team members got to prepare for their final exams at the same time (as the following week is exam week) and one of the team member got to work in his industrial training.

So, our objective of going there is to just gain some experience and not expect to win anything, this i make it absolutely clear to the Dean as the condition of us participating.

There were two foreign teams in the Dhaka site, one of them is us and the other is Fudan University from Shanghai, out of this two teams, one of them is the Winner and the other did badly...so you can easily guess who is the winner and who did badly..:(

Nevertheless, i am absolutely proud of our team, for their courage of trying for the sake of gaining the experience, here is the photo of our proud team taken with the organzier/officers of the competition:


Our team from left: Gordon Ong a.k.a. Whale, Victor Soh and Beh Kheng Ling (officially known as KL Beh, but unofficially known as KL Bear) :)

Our trip there were fun, we have a lot to eat and the food is nice, but we strictly drank mineral water only as water there are not so safe. We only did a bit of sight-seeing on the last day, the volunteers are kind enough to take us around. The people there are mostly very friendly and MMU seems to have very good reputation in Bangladesh, I hope we have not spoiled the reputation...:( Many people wanted to take photo with us, even we were interviewed by a reporter. I managed to visit some good friends (Malaysian) who started a college there, the college is Perdana College of Malaysia.

For the rest of the story, please read the blog by Gordon as mentioned above.

Here are some photos:


The team look so happy flying...!!


The team again.


Dhaka City, where everyone is horning everyone else....(the bicycles or trishaws ringing their bells too).


The winning team from Fudan University, Shanghai. These kids are only 18 to 19 years old, mostly first year and second year students!


The Big Whale blogging offline while the Little Whale and his donkey watching. Whale Whale:your little whale really should take a bath in the washing machine!

continue to Part II