This past week we participated in the 9th annual HUST competition, hosted by Hong Ik University in Korea. Unlike most of the competitions in which we participate, all the HUST problems are in Korean only. This posed a unique challenge as many of our members could not actually read the problems without lots of help.

After the language barrier, there were also quite a few challenges in this competition that gave us a lot of trouble. Challenge M, for example, frustrated us for many hours until the moderators finally released enough hints to make the problem solvable. Even though it was sometimes annoying to keep working, after 51 hours of hacking, we were able to push through and beat out all the other teams, winning first place at HUST for the second year in a row!