International Collegiate Programming Contest at UNL Nov. 15

Released on 11/11/2008, at 2:00 AM
Office of University Communications
University of Nebraska–Lincoln

WHEN: Saturday, Nov. 15, 2008

WHERE: Avery Hall

Lincoln, Neb., November 11th, 2008 —

Forty-five teams of student computer programmers from 15 colleges and universities in six states will be on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus Nov. 15 for the North Central North America Regional competition of the IBM-sponsored Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest.

UNL's Department of Computer Science and Engineering has four teams entered in the contest. Each team consists of three students. The coach of these teams and director of the UNL site, Professor Charles Riedesel, has had teams advance from the regional level to the World Finals in six of the past 10 years.

This year's regional competitions are expected to include tens of thousands of students from universities in 83 countries on six continents, all vying for a spot at the contest's World Finals. One hundred talented teams will compete for awards, prizes, scholarships, and bragging rights to the "world's smartest trophy" April 18-22 in Stockholm, Sweden, hosted by KTH-Royal Institute of Technology.

Competing Nov. 15 at UNL will be teams from UNL, Briar Cliff University, Creighton University, Dakota State University, Doane College, Graceland University, Iowa State University, Kansas State University, Mount Marty College, Nebraska Wesleyan University, South Dakota State University, Southwest Minnesota State, University of Nebraska at Omaha, University of Nebraska at Kearney and University of North Dakota.

The contest pits teams of three students against eight or more complex, real-world problems, with a grueling 5-hour deadline. Huddled around a single computer, competitors race against the clock in a battle of logic, strategy and mental endurance. Teammates collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds, and build software systems that solve the problems under the intense scrutiny of expert judges. For a well-versed computer science student, some of the problems require precision only. Others require a knowledge and understanding of advanced algorithms. Still others are simply too hard to solve--except, of course, for the world's brightest problem solvers.

Judging is relentlessly strict. The students are given a problem statement, not a requirements document. They are given an example of test data, but they do not have access to the judges' test data and acceptance criteria. Each incorrect solution submitted is assessed a time penalty. The team that solves the most problems in the fewest attempts in the least cumulative time is declared the winner.

The UNL site for this competition has grown in recent years to be by far the largest of the approximately dozen sites which run the contest simultaneously, connected by computer networks. About 180 teams are expected to compete across the entire region. The competition will take place from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in Avery Hall on the UNL City Campus. Following the competition there will be an evening reception and awards ceremony.

To learn more about the contest, visit http://acmicpc.org or http://icpc.baylor.edu.

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