Amazon Names Ninja Coder Design Contest Winner

12-18-2009

Albert Kim, Senior University Relations Manager at Amazon, named Team Java++ as winners in the first-ever Amazon Ninja Coder Design Contest. Teams from Dr. Tim Korb's Competitive Programming course (CS 39000-004) participated in this competition to design problems for Amazon to use in their well-known series of "Ninja Coder" interview questions. Each team submitted one or two problems, which were judged by a panel of engineers at Amazon.

Members of the winning team--Zach Yater, Zeeshan Siddiqui, Eric Fischer, and Rakesh Veeramacheneni--each received a $150 Amazon.com gift certificate. Their problem, which future interviewees will have to face, involved an efficient technique to compute the number of ones in a bit vector.  The other three teams, which submitted an additional five problems, included Team Cheburashka (Zhanibek Datbayev, Arman Suleimenov, Nathan Claus), Team Griffins (Tingjun "Derek" Li, Wenyu Zhang, Yuedong Fang), and Team Gold (John Bohlmann, Kenneth Brown, Michael Bernard).  Each member of the runner-up teams received a $75 Amazon.com gift certificate.

A special thanks to Albert Kim and Amazon for supporting computer science students at Purdue!