ACM Contest Site
Northwest Site of the 2009 ACM Pacific Region Programming Contest
Hosted by UO Computer and Information Science and UO Information Services
In the fall of each year, over six thousand student programmer teams compete in regional contests for a chance to advance to the World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. The Pacific Region encompasses the Pacific Northwest US, Alaska, Hawaii, and British Columbia and attracts over eighty teams from over three dozen schools. The contest is held simultaneously at five separate sites. In November 2009, the University of Oregon was again one of the contest sites, hosted by UO Computer and Information Science and UO Information Services.
Each team in the contest consists of three students. The contest runs for five hours, during which a team attempts to solve as many problems as possible. Contest problems are story problems, and the solution is a computer program that must produce output according to the input data and the requirements as stated in the problem. This output must be exactly correct and the program must execute quickly. Problems are typically "real world" computing tasks and often more difficult to solve than they appear.
On November 7, 2009, twenty two teams from eight schools in Oregon and Washington competed in Eugene. Over the five contest location sites, there were 76 teams competing, and a team from each of the two or three top performing schools will go on to compete in the World Finals in Harbin, China in spring of 2010. Look here for the final results of the Pacific Regional contest.
On the Friday night before the contest, our local ACM student chapter hosted a pizza party and game night for the contestants in Deschutes Hall, home of the Computer and Information Science Department. Here are a few pictures of the game night.
Most of the contest activities were held at the Erb Memorial Union. The five hour contest took place in the EMU Computer Lab managed by UO Information Services.
The contest was followed by dinner at the Evergreen Indian Restaurant, and "Team Captcha" from the University of Washington was awarded a plaque and prize as the Eugene site winner. (The other two UW teams took 2nd and 3rd places at this site.) UO team "Bad Magic Number" was the top scoring team from an Oregon school.
Look here for Eugene hotel information, UO contest location, and the contest schedule .
Here are some pictures from the 2009 contest.
UO Contest Site Director: David Atkins, (541) 346-4413, datkins@uoregon.edu