Programming Challenges

This page is outdated.

Become a member of one of two Purdue programming teams for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. Drop Tomek an email.

Problems and solutions in both C++ and Java from last year's ACM Regional Contest.

Email Tomek Czajka (tomek@cs.purdue.edu) and just come to a match. Requirements: be able to write a program in one of C, C++ or Java.

Name	Date	Problems	Solutions & test data	Winners
Match One	Sept 9, 2006	A B	match1.zip	1. Nathan Claus
Match Two	Sept 16, 2006	A B	match2.zip	1. Zhanibek Datbayev
Match Three	Sept 23, 2006	A B C	match3.zip	1. Zhanibek Datbayev 2. Prakhar Gupta
Match Three	Oct 7, 2006	A B C D	match4.zip	1. Zhanibek Datbayev 2. Emil Stefanov
Purdue Local Contest	Oct 14, 2006

Learn your language - how to read numbers from standard input, how to print numbers to standard output.
Read other people's solutions (some solutions can be found above).
Learn libraries: C++ STL, Java API.
If you can't decide whether to use Java or C++ - use Java, it's better for most people.
NEVER start coding until you know exactly what you are going to write. At least 60% of the time spent on a problem should be before you touch the keyboard.
Write pseudocode on paper first, including all functions and variables.
Estimate the running time of your approach in the worst case. 100 000 000 typical elementary operations = 1 second of running time.
Use simple code that works - global arrays of maximum size are OK for contest programs.