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Internet Problem Solving Contest

IPSC 2011

Problem M – My little puppy

You have a puppy. The puppy wants your attention. As every puppy, it wants to sleep, eat, play, and sometimes something more. Be careful, be patient and read its requests carefully. Your reward will be priceless. Well, not really priceless. Your reward will be paid in negative penalty time.

Each time you answer the puppy's request, the puppy will become idle for an unknown period of time. Then the puppy will come with a new request. You have to process that request reasonably quickly. The deadline to process the new request is somewhere between 15 and 25 minutes since it was published. If you miss the deadline or choose an incorrectly option, you lose and your puppy runs away forever. If you choose correctly, you will be rewarded.

Input specification

For each request, you will get an ASCII art of the situation, and a list of available options you have. Each option is labeled by a lowercase letter.

Output specification

During the appropriate time interval, submit a text file containing a single line with a single letter – the option you chose.

(The data set for the submission can be either M1 or M2, both will work. You are only playing one game, not two of them.)

You may submit your choice for the first request at any moment during the contest. Your time starts running once you make this first submit. (It is recommended to start as early as possible, so that you have the chance to see many requests.)

Example

input
  |\_/|  
 / @ @ \
( >   < )
 ‘>>x<<’ 
 /  O  \ 

What do you see?

a) a kitten
b) an elephant
c) a dog
d) where?
output
a

All requests

Here are all the requests the teams could encounter during the contests. Based on the answer for request 1, the teams would receive requests 2-15 in four possible orders. (The requests are included as plain text files, the top section always lists the consequences of the four choices. The syntax should be obvious.)

1 (start), 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 (victory), -1 (loss).