How I got into Progmeistars: the list that lied

My computer science teacher recommended the Progmeistars courses in Riga. They took students only through selection: you couldn’t just pay and come.

In 10th grade I went to the selection for the free group. A friend checked the list and told me I wasn’t on it. A week later they called me: “Why didn’t you come to the second round? You did very well.”

In the second round I didn’t solve the maths problem: maths was weaker for me than programming. And I asked to go straight to a harder course and skip the first one.

In class Sergey Ilyich Melnik gave us a task: print the even letters of a word. I wrote it all with for and downto, and he laughed: “while is simpler.” Then he asked what 53 and 27 is. I could have answered by writing both numbers in binary. But I didn’t get what exactly he was asking, doubted myself, was afraid of blurting out something wrong and kept quiet. They put me into the second semester, where binary arithmetic was taught, and in the summer moved me up to the fifth, where we were already doing recursion and quicksort.

In 11th grade he added me, as the twelfth member, to the “elite” olympiad group funded by the Soros Foundation. “Forget about money,” he said, “it’s free.”

The turning point was dynamic programming. The problem “split 100 stones into two equal piles” I solved at once, and better than anyone.