UCLA sent three teams of three people ““ UCLA Blue, UCLA
Gold and UCLA Bruins ““ to participate in a regional computer
programming competition Saturday in Riverside.
The Association for Computing Machinery’s International
Collegiate Programming Contest’s Southern California
regional, sponsored by IBM and hosted by Riverside Community
College, pitted UCLA’s three teams against 56 other teams
from across Southern California and parts of Nevada.
Teams had five hours to solve six problems and had a choice of
programming languages: Java, C and C++. Judging was based on the
number of problems solved and on the amount of time taken to solve
them.
Students had to solve problems in a shorter time period than
what is usually allotted in classes.
“You don’t have two weeks to meditate over (a
problem). Here you have one hour to get it done,” said
fourth-year computer science student Jason Schroeder, a member of
the UCLA Gold team.
Though it may be difficult to imagine spending five hours of a
Saturday afternoon programming, there are advantages to
participating in ACM’s competition.
“ACM has highly visible publications,” said Alex
Weinstein, fourth-year computer science student from UCLA Gold.
“It’s one of the places you try to get
published.”
One of the simpler problems involved computing the number of
workdays between two dates and filtering out weekends and specified
holidays, said computer science graduate student Everett Anderson
from the UCLA Bruins team.
“You have to develop an elegant solution,” added
Chris Guillory, a third-year computer science and engineering
student.
Elegant solutions involve taking a more efficient approach to a
problem, as opposed to brute force solutions that examine all
possible answers and will reach the same solution, but in a longer
amount of time, Anderson said.
To prepare for the competition, the UCLA teams conducted some
mock competitions and practiced with problem sets from previous
years, though practice time was limited, Anderson said.
“We didn’t find out about this competition until
about a week ago,” he joked.Â
Competitors from UCLA discovered that competition conditions
varied greatly from practice conditions.
“The judges test all of the common mistakes you can
make,” Guillory said, adding that in practice, the teams
checked fewer things than the judges would test.
First place went to California Institute of Technology students
and the UCLA teams managed to nab the ninth, 18th and 25th
spots.
Though none of the UCLA students involved had participated in an
ACM competition before, it was not intimidating, Anderson said.
“I’ve always wanted to try a programming competition
like this,” he said.
Caltech’s team will have the chance to compete in the ACM
ICPC’s World Finals in Prague next March.
“It’s like the Sugar Bowl of programming
competitions,” said fourth-year mathematics and computation
student David Harr, who was on the UCLA Blue team.
ACM was established in 1947 and is the oldest society for
computational engineers and students.