The ACM Regional Programming Contest was held on Saturday, November 12th. The winners of the regional competitions secure a place to compete in the world championship in Warsaw, Poland. The program was sponsored this year by IBM and brought students from across the Midwest and parts of Canada to compete. Sixteen sites across Minnesota, Wisconsin, Western Ontario, Manitoba, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Michigan held regional competitions simultaneously, with two to three teams from the region advancing to the world finals. Thirty-five teams competed at UNL's regional site, representing twelve schools across five states. Although teams competing at UNL usually progress, this year a team representing the University of Madison - Wisconsin, “The Antisocial Network”, solved ten problems to beat out all other regional teams. UNL’s competition lasted for five hours, with the site’s winning team, "cy5", representing Iowa State and solving six problems.
UNL was represented in the competition by eight teams. UNL teams "The God-Emperors of Mankind" and "ThunderKiats" placed second and third respectively at the UNL competition, and tenth and eleventh in the region, solving five problems each. The regional site’s second-place team, “The God-Emperors of Mankind”, consisted of freshmen Carrie Adkisson and Evan Schultz, and first-year graduate student Jinfu Leng. The third place team, “ThunderKiats”, was composed of all freshmen: Brandon Collins, Brian Clymer, and Davis Goodin. Another noteworthy team, consisting of Claire Carlson, Sarah Fanning, and Michael Draftz, solved four problems.
The regional branch of the contest recognizes achievement in programming and advances those winning teams to the world finals where they will compete against one hundred other teams. Last year 24,915 students from over 2,070 universities participated in the regional competitions. The ACM-ICPC World Finals will be held May 14-18, 2012, in Warsaw, Poland. Teams compete regionally from September through November to qualify for the International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals. C/C++ and Java will be the presiding programming languages.
Complete results of the regional competition can be found at http://cs.unomaha.edu/~acmregn/rankorder.html.