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.

This year our teams traveled to the regional competition at Eastern Washington University in Spokane, November 9-10. We sent three great teams of hot shot programmers and placed 10th and 13th in the field of 77 teams competing. In particular we placed a team higher than any other Oregon or Washington team. (As usual, Stanford and Berkeley took the top five positions - but there's always next year.)

!!!! Check out the photos from this year's contest.

The faculty adviser for this year's teams was David Atkins. John Fiskio-Lasseter also coached the teams.

To prepare for the competition, we met for several hours each Monday at 5 PM and practiced solving problems under contest like conditions.

In the real competition, teams were given eight program specifications, along with sample input 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 time penalty for each incorrect solution). The efficiency of the solution is not a factor in judging, but solutions are limited in the amount of compute time they can use, so some correct, but very slow solutions may not be accepted. Note that the problem descriptions give sample input and output, but this may not be completely representative of the input the judges will use. Formatting of solution output must be exactly as specified by the problem statement. When a team's solution is accepted by the judges, the team gets a balloon with color corresponding to the problem.

Each team of three programmers had a single workstation on which to enter and submit the code for problem solutions, using contest software. The programming languages permitted are C++, Pascal, and Java. Printers were available to generate hard copy.

For a large number of practice problems, go to the Valladolid problem set. In addition to a huge list of problems, this site also has an automated judge system to which you can submit your solution and find out within minutes if it is accepted.

Look here for some thoughts we set down about team strategy. We have also assembled a set of solutions to our practice problems for use as a reference during this and future competitions.

Look here for some examples of I/O in C and in C++.

Last updated 2002/04/10