A team of WUSTL students has won the mid-central regional International Collegiate Programming Contest, placing first out of 122 teams from Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas.
The annual contest is run by The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The contest involves teams of college students trying to solve difficult programming problems, against the clock. The WUSTL students competed at Webster University Nov. 5 in St. Louis.
The students are James Aguilar and Adam Norberg, undergraduates in computer science and engineering, and Albert Mao, a graduate student from the School of Medicine.
William Smart, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer science and engineering, coached the team.
“The win in the regional means that we’ll be going to the world finals in San Antonio in April,” Smart said. “Only 75 teams from all over the world will be at this event.
“This is a real feather in the team’s cap, because these contests are really hard.”
Aguilar said, “The problems are generally just tricky questions that one can use a computer to solve. One possible instance of a problem would be a problem that describes a very complicated board game and asks a contestant to write a program that determines who won the game after a certain set of moves.
“Another possible problem would be to give the contestant a university course schedule including prerequisites and require the contestant to write a program that will determine the minimal number of semesters required to complete all of the courses.”
The problem may seem easy on the surface, but Aguilar said that the hard part is that the contestants can only write programs that answer the question — the contestant is not allowed to help the program answer any of the questions.
Another difficult twist to the competition is that if your program fails, you are given chances to fix it, but the judges will not tell you how your program failed — only that it failed. Contestants have to figure out the “how” on their own.
“The contest questions are extremely difficult,” Aguilar said. “For example, one of the seven problems our team solved was unsolved by any other team in the entire region. When you consider that among those teams there are 372 of the most brilliant collegiate programming minds in the Midwest, the fact that only one team answered the question correctly becomes more impressive.
“Perhaps the greatest indication of the difficulty of the questions is that there was one of the nine questions which no team solved — ours didn’t even try, after reading it.”
There’s also an element of teamwork that is very important here. The three students only have a single computer among them. This means that they must optimize the process of solving problems.
Deciding who should actually type in the solution to a particular problem, and who should be thinking about the next problem is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. Because the problems are timed, the ability to perform this coordination effectively can often be the difference between winning and losing.
The WUSTL team did a particularly good job in this aspect of the competition, and that was reflected in its final score, which was considerably better than that of the second-place team.
The WUSTL team took about 4.5 hours to complete the questions they answered. There is a time limit of five hours for the entire contest, which is completed simultaneously across the entire region.
“Being able to win against such a tough field is probably the best thing about winning the contest,” Aguilar said. “After we won, we were all in shock, and it definitely makes me feel like there is no obstacle too large for me to conquer in the future.
“Being a champion in the true sense of the word feels amazing.”