November 23, 1996
A team of three University of Washington students bested
more than 40 other teams today to take first place in the
Pacific
Regionals of the
ACM International
Collegiate Programming Contest.
The UW team -- along with Stanford, the runner-up in the Pacific Regionals -- will compete against roughly 40 other teams from around the world in the International finals at the ACM97 Conference in San Jose CA in March.
UW's winning team consisted of CSE graduate student Doug Zongker, Computer Engineering undergraduate Chris Prince, and Computer Science undergraduate Yih-Chun Hu.
Sponsored by Microsoft, the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is the oldest and largest programming competition for the world's universities and colleges, with more than 1000 teams competing at the regional level for spots among the 40+ finalists.
The teams are given 8 programming problems to be solved in the 5-hour contest period. The contest programming environment is Microsoft Windows and VC++.
The principal criterion in determining a team's standing is the number of problems solved correctly. Among teams solving the same number of problems correctly, the tie-breaking criterion involves the number of "penalty points" assessed. (When a team submits a correct solution to a problem, one penalty point is assessed for each minute that has elapsed from the start of the contest until the submission of the correct solution, plus 20 penalty points for each time an incorrect solution to that problem was submitted. No penalty points are assessed if a correct solution is not submitted.)
In addition to the winning team, a second UW team
placed 9th out of the 44 teams in the Pacific Regionals.
This team consisted of
CSE graduate student
Corey Anderson,
Computer Engineering undergraduate
Richard Chinn,
and Computer Science undergraduate
Sean McDirmid.
This team suffered a setback when Computer Science undergraduate Amanda Barrett was disqualified at the last minute. Her B.A. in Economics from Smith made her team ineligible since at most one member of each team may have received a Bachelor's degree, no matter in what. (Corey Anderson had participated in two previous contests, so it seemed sensible to retain him as the one Bachelors degree recipient on the team.) Sean McDirmid, who had not practiced with the team, was drafted at the last minute to replace Amanda.
Overall results of the Pacific Regionals are here; the top five finishers were University of Washington A (6 problems solved correctly), Stanford A (5), Stanford B (4), University of British Columbia A (4), and UC Berkeley A (3).
Last year, UW's team finished third out of the 40+ teams in the Pacific Regionals, behind Simon Fraser University and the UC Berkeley team that went on to win the International contest.
This is the third year that UW CSE has hosted the
contest.
This year the contest was held in the new
Instructional Programming Laboratory -- 70 Intel Pentium
systems running Microsoft Windows 95 and
Microsoft VC++, used primarily
for supporting CSE 142, "Computer Programming I."
This lab was created in conjunction with UW's Office of
Undergraduate Education and Office of Computing &
Communications.
CSE staff involved in supporting the contest included
Fred Videon, Renee Reed, Mark Murray,
Leila Belhadjali, Jiamian Chen,
Jason Aten, Brian Wheeler, Rafiq Rahim,
Erik Lundberg, and Alicen Smith.
Student volunteers included Mel Ericksen, Michael Babbit, Paul Franklin, Casey Anderson, Peter Brzezicki, and Dung Cao.
CSE faculty members Craig Chambers and Dan Weld oversaw both the hosting and the two UW teams.