Purdue CS Programming Teams Compete in ACM Contest

Four teams from Purdue University competed Saturday, October 22, 2011 in the 36th annual ACM East-Central North America Regional Inter-Collegiate Programming Contest sponsored by IBM. Purdue teams Gold, Griffins, Green, and Blue joined about 100 other programming teams representing around 50 schools from western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, eastern Ontario, and Indiana in this “Battle of the Brains.” Chief competition included the University of Waterloo, Carnegie Mellon University, and last year's international second-place team, the University of Michigan.

Coach Dr. Tim Korb joined this outstanding group of programmers at the University of Cincinnati for the competition. Students participating in the contest were enrolled in the Competitive Programming course taught by Dr. Korb, which meets weekly for discussion and practice sessions. The students work on algorithmic and mathematical puzzles whose solutions are expressed in the form of computer programs. The goal is to solve as many problems as quickly as possible while avoiding inaccurate submissions.

The ACM Programming Contest was a five-hour event in which teams of three students worked together to solve eight to ten programming puzzles. Ranking among teams was based first on how many problems were solved correctly, then on how many minutes it took to solve each problem. A 20-minute penalty on solved problems was added for each submission that failed to pass the judges' test cases. Programming was done in Java or C/C++.

The Department of Computer Science sent the teams off with well wishes, meeting at the Echo Spiral on Friday, October 21 at 1:00 p.m.

Live updates of the teams' results appeared on the Purdue Computer Science page on Facebook and on Twitter @PurdueCS.

UPDATE: The Purdue teams did well at the competition, placing 10th, 24th, and 32nd (out of 122 total teams) and receiving an honorable mention. See the article "Teams fare well at challenge" in The Exponent.