UW students rank near the top in national computer contest

Bernadette Galban
Daily Staff

Three UW students placed second in the annual International Collegiate Programming Contest held last week in San Jose.

The students are computer science undergraduate Yih-Chun Hu, computer engineering undergraduate Chris Prince, and Computer Science and Engineering graduate student Doug Zongker. Corey Anderson, a grad student in computer science, was their team manager.

The contest, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Microsoft, had about 1,500 teams from major universities across the globe.

"This was the first year the UW team has ever made it to finals," Prince said. "It was an extremely exciting moment, to say the least."

Zongker illustrated the international extent of the contest, saying, "We tied for second with University of Queensland, Australia."

A team from Harvey Mudd College, an elite undergraduate engineering school in Southern California, took first place.

To be eligible to compete, participants must be students in computer science and computer engineering. The team must have only one grad student per team, who can only have completed less than two years of grad school.

"The team selection was quite informal," Zongker said. "People interested got together, practiced a little, then divided up into two teams of three."

The contest has a two-level structure. To get to finals, the UW team had to finish first or second in the Pacific Regional contest, which was held in late November in Seattle. The regionals included teams from Washington, Oregon, Northern California and British Columbia.

The UW team took first place when they competed in regionals. They were the first ones to correctly solve six problems. They beat 43 other teams, including teams from Stanford, Berkeley and the University of British Columbia.

The finals round of the contest lasted five hours and concentrated on eight programming problems. Six of the teams correctly solved six problems, including the UW.

Preparation involved intensive practice and a strong computer science background.

Anderson, who was also a contestant in regionals said, "The team held a few 'simulated' contests to work on their contest-day mechanics and team dynamics."

The winning team is the team that solves the most problems in five hours.

"For tie breakers, the team that solves the problems fastest wins," Prince said. In this case, the UW and University of Queensland team tied within a tie breaker, which explains why both teams were placed second.

Anderson finds it hard to compare contest problems to classroom problems.

"It's really difficult to make this comparison. What could be said was that, to solve all the problems, team members drew from most all their CS background," Anderson said.

Hu added, "Some problems were at junior level - like the course 'CSE data structures 326.'"

Because of the intensity of the contest, team members were not able to acquaint with other teams.

"There was also a language barrier with teams from other countries, like teams from Taiwan or Sweden, for example," Prince said.

For coming in second place, each UW team member received a travel stipend from the ACM, a travel stipend from a computer science honor society and $1,500 cash prize, along with plaques for recognition.

"We also received Microsoft software for winning regionals," Hu added.

Along with other UW team members, Prince feels the same pride with their international success.

"It was quite an honor to compete against other top schools in the world, including MIT, Cal Tech and Harvard," Prince said.

Regardless of where they placed, though, the UW team agrees they had an experience they will not soon forget.