The previous year saw by far the greatest results of Georgian programming olympiads movement in whole and me in particular, the quintessence of which were the Bronze Medals at ACM ICPC 2009. But let me recollect them all in chronological order.
So, January began with two Topcoder SRMs prepared by Georgian writers - first of them by nika and the second by my very self. These were the first (at least as far as I know) international-level competitions with problemsets written by Georgians.
Our problemsetting experiment continued soon after at Winter Programming School in Kharkiv in February. The sixth day of the School was fully prepared by our team Tbilisi SU Triumvirate (Bogdanov, Jimsheleishvili, Lekveishvili) and its coach Temuri Zarkua. Also, we finished second in the overall raiting of the School.
Then, April came and we went to Stockholm in our quest for Georgia's first medals at ACM ICPC Finals. And the debut was really successful :)
Soon after the Finals, George also conducted his first SRM, and I had another two (440, 443).
Well, what else was there? In the end of June, George and me took the third place at KPI Open 2009. In September, I wrote the problemset for Vekua Cup 2009 Individual Competition. In November, Eduard and me took the second place at Open South Caucasian Championship 2009, the team Tbilisi SANGU 1 (Benidze, Rachvelishvili, Rukhadze) won the title of Champion of Georgia for the first time, and Nika took the sixth place at Google Code Jam Finals.
And now, for those of you who think 'What the hell is that red thing in the title', let's get to the final part of this post and my olympic year - my Topcoder rating. I firmly announced somewhen in Autumn that I would meet the New Year with red color at Topcoder, which means getting one's rating over 2200. I changed my handle from eyler to gojira_tc (simply gojira was already taken :|) and kept repeating that the new handle would only look good in red color. In the meanwhile, my rating graph kept falling and climbing, and finally December came with me still hanging close to the cherished line. I took the 11th place at the next-to-last SRM of the year and came closer to red than ever and was looking forward to the last SRM.
The last match of the year was on 6:00AM by Georgian time. Moreover, I had been celebrating the coming holidays on the evening of the previous day. So nothing really assumed that I would manage to keep my word, but still I decided to try. After performing decently in the coding phase, I was around the 50th place, which would guarantee a sufficient rating increase. However, I've made a couple of successful challenges, and looking at the division summary again, was utterly surpirsed, seeing my handle at the 5th place. The thing that surprised me even more was my score - 666 points. I decided to stop any challenge activity and keep the score. I found a code which was failing - at least I was sure I had the proper testcase. But I forced myself to leave it alone. After the testing, my position changed to #3, making it my best performance ever and giving me an unconditional red color. I saw that the code I thought was wrong actually passed the system test, which means I would spoil my great result if I tried to challenge it. Therefore, 666 points saved me.
So, now you can see my red-colored handle and complacent mug. As for me, I am going to take my friends to khinkali as a tribute to the forces which assisted me with their 666 points.
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