Luka the Genius

Yes he is a topcoder("TOP"-COder), yes he is Red, Yes he is a Target, Yes you see his handle

in the home page, Yes he is a Croation !

Guess Who is he ?
Iam sure many of you already have (ofcourse), I am talking of none other than our silent killer - Luka Kalinovcic,(better known as Kalinov).
The first thing that I decided to do when I heard about this years blogging contest was to Contact Kalinov and request him for an interview, although I did have a chance to converse with him previously, but I guess I wanted to get a little personal this time.

Born in Zagreb,Croatia this dude happened to write his first computer program when he was just 13 years, and from then on its been a sweet song all the way. Kalinov is currently pursuing a Bachelors degree from the University of Zagreb in the field of Electrical Engineering and Computing.

Coming from an average family Kalinov spent most of his childhood playing various kind of sports and other fun activities. Be it soccer, hockey, judo or even playing guitar he has done it all.

School was boring and so were his subjects, (he did find math interesting though).

But well he made some great friends then - according to him "they" are most important to him in life.
But yes as a high schooler he developed an affinity towards algorithmic problems and programming - thanks to "BASIC"
He started programming as a hobby and well you all know how far he has taken it.

Here are some quickies :

Favourite Music - Keeps varying (currently some light music) Favorite Movies - Forrest Gump and La vita e bella.
Favorite Food - Sarma

Moving from high school to college wasnt really a pleasant change for him. Currently in his fourth semester he has a new found interest in riding a bike and enjoys most of his time with it. Apart from programming algorithms, he spends his time listening to some light music and spending the rest of the time with his friends.

As an advice for wannabes he says "The most important thing is that you enjoy doing that what you do. Ofcourse, you have to practice often and hard and not give up easily. Don't hesitate to ask for help. There are a lot of people willing to help you out."

He enjoys problems which involve insightful knowledge and well then a lot of code to solve it. He likes Yarins problems a lot. His favourite subjects include Computational Geometry and Number Theory.

When enquired about his approach to single SRM he says "I try to get as calm as I can, and not to be hasty when reading the problem. I usually take a quick look on my problem before submitting, and then one more look after submitting. I often challenge some solutions just because I the problem was hard for me, so I hope it was also hard for the others."

Well it was a pleasure interviewing him and there is hardly anything that you cant learn from him,

Check out one of my older blogs here (about him)
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There were some interesting answers to some interesting questions during the interview,

For the whole un-edited version check this out : http://www.freewebs.com/rnrathod/Questions%20&%20Answers.txt

Here is the

Visual DNA Report : http://friends.imagini.net/vdna.php?uid=692468-ff10&srv=iwebhd3

(Click on the switch view box next to the text (anonymous)

Boy oh boy that tells you a lot about his character.

Hope you enjoyed the stuff !! :)