Friday, October 23, witnessed the most anticipated programming competition in Atlantic Canada. Teams from Atlantic Canadian universities gathered at Dalhousie University in a show-off of programming and problem-solving skills. Each team consisted of 3 participants, mostly undergraduate computer science students. The teams were given 5 hours to tackle 6 problems. The problem complexity ranged from easy, suitable for second year undergraduate students in computer science, to more complex ones that even graduates would find challenging. The algorithmic solutions to the problems ranged from basic searching and sorting, to dynamic programming, to geometry.
17 minutes into the contest, the SMU Huskies, led by my colleague Chris Adams, solved their first problem. Withing the hour, a few more teams solved their first problem, but by that time SMU Huskies had already solved their second problem. They were on the roll.
At the end of the competition, the Huskies had solved 4 out of 6 problems, qualifying to compete at the ACM ICPC Northeast North America Programming Contest in Fredericton, NB, next Saturday.
The final results were announced at the APICS conference today:
- #4 smu_huskies 4 problems 456 minutes
Saint Mary’s University, CS Huskies
Chris Adams, Jonathan Kenney, Lucas Mannell - #14 mounta_thought, 2 problems, 126 minutes
Mount Allison University, Deep Thought
Andrew Edmunds, Jason Rhinelander, Marc St. Onge - #19 dal_gold, 2 problems, 137 minutes
Dalhousie University, Dalhousie Gold
John Doucette, Ross Story, Brian Wolff - #10 unbf_blacks, 2 problems, 174 minutes
University of New Brunswick at Fredericton, UNB Blacks
Bradley Aune, Cody Harris, Ian Bishop - #20 upei_sl, 2 problems, 332 minutes
University of Prince Edward Island, UPEI Skull Lightning
Nick MacAulay, Peter Workman, Stanley DeBoer - #16 acadia_red, 2 problems, 339 minutes
Acadia University, Acadia Red
Alex Sanford, Matthew Penney, Ryan Wooden
Congratulations to Chris and SMU for a well-deserved victory, and better luck for the other teams next year.
Damn you sir. I just spent 80 minutes doing the first two, but that was coding in Perl. I really miss the HASH and ARRAY syntax of Perl whenever I venture out into other languages.
Congratulations to the SMU Huskies. The East Central NA Contest is this Saturday (at McMaster University). I’ll make sure my team gets some practice on those problems that you linked.
Thanks for the post Tony!
Christopher: Problems A and B? We didn’t solve A, although we had a good solution using DP that was missing some case. Problem B went pretty quick. We solved in the order: C, B, F, D