Two teams of three Millersville students recently tested their problem solving skills in the 32nd annual Association for Computing Machinery’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Collegiate Programming Contest. The contest was hosted by Shippensburg University and is the first tier of ACM’s International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).
After competing in regional contests from September to December, which are host to approximately 6,700 teams representing 1,821 universities from 83 countries on six continents, the top 100 teams worldwide advance to the world finals that will be held for one week in Stockholm in spring 2009.
IBM Software Group has sponsored ICPC since 1997, awarding monetary prizes, computers, and other tangible prizes along with bragging rights which put students on a fast track ticket to golden careers, according to Doug Heintzman, director of strategy at IBM Software Group. Heintzman has been involved in the competition for the past eight years, the last six of which he was an executive sponsor.
“There are so many different permutations that people on their own with a pencil and paper couldn’t figure it out,” Heintzman said, “So we use computers to do a lot of the heavy number crunching, but we still have to solve the problem and to develop the strategies to attack the problem, so what this competition does is it celebrates excellence in the analysis of a problem set coupled up with strategies, implementing those strategies in programming.”
Todd Echterling, who has been coach of the Millersville teams since fall 1998, enters at least two teams each year in the ACM regional contest, and two to three teams in a state competition each spring at the Pennsylvania Association of Computer and Information Science Educators (PACISE) Conference.
The two teams sent this year to the ACM contest were the Millersville Marauders comprised of, David Hober, Dan Baker, and Josh Adams, and the Millersville Daemon Llamas including, Ken Mitton, Jordan Hollinger, and Will Killian.
“The main contribution that I like to convey to the team is confidence,” said Echterling. “We compete in one of the most challenging regions of the contest. There are some real big computer science schools in our region. But our guys always go in confident and perform well.”
Teams were given five hours to complete eight or more complex real world problems, which according to Heitzman are built by some of the worlds leading mathematicians and computer science specialists.
“During the contest it is a very intense calm. So quiet you can hear a pin drop. Each team huddled around a single computer. At times there are little outbursts of excitement when a team solves a problem correctly. After the contest is over you hear a lot of sighs of relief,” said Echterling.
William Killian said, “Everyone on the team worked well together. We each solved one problem and worked together on the remaining challenges,” who is junior Computer Science major
Each incorrect solution submitted is given a time penalty and the team that solves the most problems in the fewest attempts in the least cumulative time is declared the winner, according to ACM-ICPC guidelines.
The Millersville Marauders placed 12 out of 13 at Shippensburg and 105 out of 146 in the Mid-Atlantic Region, while the Millersville Daemon Llamas placed fourth out of 13 at Shippensburg and 40 out of 146 in the Mid-Atlantic Region.
“The biggest challenge was managing time and trying to finish a problem that took too long to solve a solution,” said Killian. “There was one computer for the three of us to use, so we had to take turns and manage our time well.”
The teams, which had been preparing for the event on a weekly basis prior to the competition, by evaluating sample problems, programming a solution, then submitting it to an online judge for grading, hope to increase their knowledge of algorithms and problem solving skills for next year’s competition.
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