By Emily Rivard
University students competed in the prestigious ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) International Collegiate Programming Contest, a contest in which colleges across the world compete to become the winner in the ultimate “Battle of the Brains,” just a few weeks ago on Nov. 4.
The competition is a challenge to determine which team, representing several different colleges, has the most knowledge about computer programming.
It began in 1970 as competition hosted by the Alpha Charter of the UPE Computer Science Honor Society at Texas A&M and has been gaining popularity over the past 30 years. The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest became a multi-tier competition in 1977 and has been supported by IBM since 1997.
The recent competition was held at Kean University in New Jersey and included representatives from over 30 colleges, including Cornell University, Columbia University, Princeton University, Yale University, and New York University. Overall, the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest will host competitors from over 6,000 colleges, 82 countries, and six continents.
Eventually, 90 of the best college teams will continue on to the World Finals in April, hosted by the University of Alberta.
This year, the University’s team, which consisted of seniors Matthew Ficken, Andrea Blumenthal and sophomore John Ferrell, set a new record by placing 19th out of 56 teams and answering five out of nine problems correctly.
“Hofstra received an honorable mention, but did not place in the top 12,” said Dana Procaccino, promoter for the competition.
Training for the competition takes a grueling amount of work and dedication.
“We met once a week to work on problems,” said senior team member Andrea Blumenthal.
“To prepare, we did problems from previous competitions,” said fellow senior team member Matthew Ficken, “as well as problems created by our coach, Dr. Liang.”
The team found that the best way to conquer the problems was to separate and allow each team member to work on his or her strongest skills.
“Since the set up involves three team members and only two computers to work with, the two strongest programmers use the machines, while the third member would work on paper to design a solution to another problem,” said Ficken. “John and I, who are both computer science majors, were the programmers, while Andrea who’s a math major and a Computer Science (CS) minor worked on some of the more mathematical based problems.”
The questions asked during this five-hour event (“It’s more like 10 hours of pure coding, because you do have two computers you can work with,” Blumenthal said) cover more than a semester’s amount of work into one single afternoon.
Each problem gives the students a “real-world” scenario, which the students then deduce and create a computer programming system to solve the problem. The judging is extremely strict and does not allow students access to the requirements of solving the problem.
“Trying to tackle some of those problems alone is a very daunting task,” Blumenthal said, “Some of them can be really wordy and they aren’t always very clear.”
“Going into the competition, I honestly didn’t think we’d get that many,” Blumenthal said.
The team, however, is still extremely proud of their achievements in the ACM ICPC. “I am very proud of the success of the team in breaking the school record,” Ficken said.