Student Programming Team
The Buffleheads - First Place, Pacific Northwest Region 2002
Dan Stutzbach, James Marr, Carl Howells, and faculty advisor Gene Luks |
Each year the UO participates in the International Collegiate Programming Contest. This contest, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is a competition between teams of student programmers to see which team can solve the most programming problems in a short amount of time.
Teams are given a small number of program specifications, along with sample input files and the output that should be generated by each input. When a team thinks it has a working version of a program, they submit it to the judges, who then run it with their own input files. A team's score is based on how many programs they complete, the amount of time it takes them to finish each program, and the number of incorrect solutions submitted (there is a penalty for each incorrect solution).
UO teams compete in the Northwest Regionals against teams from Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, northern California and western Nevada. The top two teams from each region are invited to the international finals.
In 2001 the UO teams competed against almost 70 other teams at Eastern Washington University in Spokane. One team placed 10th and another 13th, each with three problems solved.
In 2002 the UO teams competed against almost 80 other teams at Devry University near Seattle. One of the UO teams from the 2001 competition, renamed Buffleheads, swept the competition by solving all six of the problems with time to spare. No other team in the competition solved all six of the problems, and the Buffleheads took first place and will go on to compete in the world finals in March, 2003.
Students who enjoy programming and problem-solving and would like to represent us in the contest should call or send e-mail to the team's faculty advisor, Gene Luks.
General information on this year's contest can be found at http://acm.baylor.edu/acmicpc.
You can also see information (and photos) from our participation in the 2001 contest.
The department also sponsors a local contest each spring quarter. This contest is open to all UO students and is good practice for the ACM competition as well as a lot of fun.