ACMeSolutions
Saturday, November 17th, 2001 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flwyd(I may provide links for this entry in the future. If you care, check back later.)
The ACM programming contest is one of the odder events you'll see. Over 60 computer geeks were up by 10am and in CU's C.S. undergraduate lab. Teams consist of three people who have access to one computer. They can (and did) have any printed material they wish -- algorithms text books, calculus books, printouts of solutions to old problems, programming books, you name it. But no digital equipment -- no calculators, PDAs, laptops, etc. Teams have five hours to complete as many of the 8 problems as possible, using C, C , Java, or Ada (!).
The problems range from stripping the host and network parts of an IP address or printing the string generated by a sequence of telephone buttons to implementing minesweeper or solving minesweeper. Most teams see how to solve most problems fairly quickly, and then struggle with dumb bugs (I spent several minutes debugging only to find that I was writing to the same array position several times, rather than writing to board[i][j]) and anal I/O (I really need to practice detecting a blank line). The top team from our site (Texas Tech) got 7 correct, a CU team got 6 correct, and a New Mexico Tech team got 6 correct, but with a greater combined time than the CU team. Our team got two correct, with another one almost correct (mine) and a few more that were programmed (on paper) but not coded (one mine) and one that was close, but with no cigar. There are all sorts of reasons our team could have done better, but it was fun, and I should be able to kick ass next year.
Anyway, I'm soon off to the World Famous Sink for the post-contest banquet. Yay!
The ACM programming contest is one of the odder events you'll see. Over 60 computer geeks were up by 10am and in CU's C.S. undergraduate lab. Teams consist of three people who have access to one computer. They can (and did) have any printed material they wish -- algorithms text books, calculus books, printouts of solutions to old problems, programming books, you name it. But no digital equipment -- no calculators, PDAs, laptops, etc. Teams have five hours to complete as many of the 8 problems as possible, using C, C , Java, or Ada (!).
The problems range from stripping the host and network parts of an IP address or printing the string generated by a sequence of telephone buttons to implementing minesweeper or solving minesweeper. Most teams see how to solve most problems fairly quickly, and then struggle with dumb bugs (I spent several minutes debugging only to find that I was writing to the same array position several times, rather than writing to board[i][j]) and anal I/O (I really need to practice detecting a blank line). The top team from our site (Texas Tech) got 7 correct, a CU team got 6 correct, and a New Mexico Tech team got 6 correct, but with a greater combined time than the CU team. Our team got two correct, with another one almost correct (mine) and a few more that were programmed (on paper) but not coded (one mine) and one that was close, but with no cigar. There are all sorts of reasons our team could have done better, but it was fun, and I should be able to kick ass next year.
Anyway, I'm soon off to the World Famous Sink for the post-contest banquet. Yay!
