MEET THE TEAMS OF 2020
Team name: KFC
Institution: Ateneo de Manila University
Coach: Vernon Gutierrez
1. Is there a person or story your team admires or looks to for inspiration?
Kevin Charles Atienza is a legend for us Philippine competitive programmers. He’s usually the Head Judge and problem setter for the local contests, including ICPC Manila and the Philippines’ NOI. All of us aspire to become a Grandmaster like him.
2. What type of problem do you think is the hardest, and why?
Any problem written by Kevin, honestly. It’s a common joke that Team Notebooks will not help at all in his contests – and honestly that’s 95% true. His problems always require really nice insights and observations and very seldom require advanced or obscure data structures and algorithms. He also seems to be fond of a lot of tricky edge cases, which can be really frustrating under contest pressure. That being said, his problems have a signature elegance that makes them really satisfying – but it’s something we can only really appreciate after the contest is over. Ah, we also have to mention the obligatory “arcane black magic math problem” of his – there’s at least one per contest!
3. How did you come up with your team name?
Two years ago, our university hosted a programming contest for high schoolers. One of the teams that joined was comprised of two of our IOI contingent and one from the IMO contingent – which was way above the power level of a lot of the other teams. They called themselves Team KFC, which stood for the Kevin Fan Club. They even brought a drawing of the kevinsogo profile picture which they held during the awarding! So, KFC became something of an in-joke within our Programming Varsity (ProgVar). When the three of us teamed up, someone noticed that the initials of Kyle, Franz, and Cisco spelled out KFC, so we knew that it had to be our team name. Unfortunately, I don’t think the actual KFC fast food chain will sponsor us, although we did celebrate our ICPC Malaysia performance by having dinner at one! #ICPC2020 (See full post on Facebook)
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