CS Programming Teams Compete in ACM Contest
11-02-2012
Four teams from Purdue University competed Saturday, November 3, 2012 in the 37th annual ACM East-Central North America Regional Inter-Collegiate Programming Contest sponsored by IBM. Purdue teams Amber, Black, Gold, and Silver 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 Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Waterloo, the University of Toronto, and the University of Michigan.
Coach Tim Korb joined this outstanding group of programmers at the University of Cincinnati for the competition. Students that participated in the contest are 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 is a five-hour event in which teams of three students work together to solve eight to ten programming puzzles. Ranking among teams is based first on how many problems are solved correctly, then on how many minutes it takes to solve each problem. A 20-minute penalty on solved problems is added for each submission that fails to pass the judges' test cases. Programming is 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, November 2 at 1:00 p.m.
Live updates of the teams' results appeared on the Purdue Computer Science page on Facebook and on Twitter @PurdueCS. Among competing teams at the University of Cincinnati site, Purdue Gold took third place and Purdue Black took fourth, earning each team prizes.
| Team | Members | Final Position Overall |
|---|---|---|
| Purdue Amber |
Zhandos Zhylkaidar |
70th place |
| Purdue Black |
Leo Osvald |
31st place |
| Purdue Gold |
Nathaniel Cherry |
18th place |
| Purdue Silver |
Yuxi Chen |
37th place |