Coders Compete for Kudos

Eighty-eight teams from three dozen schools competed in the ACM Pacific Northwest Region Programming Contest. The region has a large number of teams, so the contest is held simultaneously at five sites. The University of Oregon was one of those sites, hosting twenty-four teams from eleven schools. The UO event was hosted by Computer and Information Science and Information Services at the EMU Computer Lab.

Three-student teams were given five hours to solve as many programming problems as possible. The programming problems are typically story problems that recreate real-world programming challenges. Team members must write code to generate the correct output quickly.

Teams from the University of Washington took the top three places in the Eugene site competition. In the Pacific Northwest Region, teams from Stanford took first and second places, with the University of California at Berkeley placing third. The top three teams from different schools will represent the region in the World Finals in Stockholm, Sweden in April.

The top University of Oregon team, Suspicious Shadowing, placed twenty-first in the region. That result, said contest director David Atkins, was a little disappointing.
“It just means we’ll have to work harder in practicing for the next time,” Atkins said. “Having the contest here can generate more enthusiasm among our students.” The contest takes the concepts and algorithms that students learn in class and forces competitors to apply those ideas under pressure.

“The time constraints placed on the competition force you to think about solving problems in a different way than work–or class-related programming,” said Josh Yaganeh, a member of The Unhandled Exceptions, one of the University of Oregon teams. “The most difficult part was trying to tackle problems that were unlike others I have previously encountered in a timed setting and without access to online esources.”

Atkins said that the problems may sound easy, but they are not. “Problems are generally stated in terms that are easy to understand for anyone. A solution is not so easy to state,” said Atkins. (See a sample question below.) These contests “help students to see that algorithms that they learn in theory are actually relevant to everyday problems. Participating in the contest is a positive thing for a student to list on a resume, and I’m sure that the winners of the world finals have good job offers as a direct result of their contest performance.”

Computer and Information Science and Information Services plan to host the event again next fall.