CS Students Challenge Each Other in Another Programming Contest

UT Dallas Computer Science students once again got to show off their programming skills on Saturday afternoon, February 14^th. A computer programming contest was organized by UTD ACM student chapter with the help of Professor Ivor Page. Prof. Ivor Page has been organizing these competitions for the last several years. Twenty-three teams consisting of approximately fifty students signed up for the programming contest.

The contest involved two programming skill levels: Novice and Advanced. The advanced level contest was set at the level of the regional ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) whereas the novice level was set at the level of a high school advanced contest. The competitors had three hours to complete a series of questions using Java or C++. No web access was allowed and each team only had one computer to work on.

The top three winners for each category are listed below:

Advanced Team Rankings:

Team       Solved   Penalties

1. Team 7     5         421     Michael LoPiccolo, Georgiy Klimenko
2. Team 15   3         297     Nikoli Cartagena, Zac Richied, Abby Lam
3. Team 8    2         164    Samuel Katz, Jared Looper*, Dino Ochialini

Novice Team Rankings:

Team      Solved   Penalties

1. Team 12     2         71      Esther Goldstein, Karan Shukla, Alekhya                  Nandula
2. Team 17     2         145     AjaAjar Karthik Ganeson
3. Team 18    2          191     Prathamesh Chavan, Sweta Krishna  Murthy, Priyanka Gundeli

All but one of the members of the three winning advanced teams are also Computer Science Computing Scholars Honor students. Likewise, two of the members of the winning team in the novice category are CS² Honor students.

Professor Page explained that the students were given challenging problem sets to solve, especially in the advanced category. Advanced knowledge of algorithms and data structures was needed to solve these problems.

“I was particularly pleased to see that the CS^2 Honors students were on the winning teams for both advanced and novice levels,” he said.

The ACM student chapter is planning to have another contest in about three weeks. Such contests provide students with excellent opportunities to learn from each other as well as apply what they have learned in class.

The  Department of Computer Science at UT Dallas  is one of the largest CS departments in the United States with more than 1300 undergraduate, 1150 master, and 150 PhD students.  The Department is committed to pursuing excellence in teaching and research in a culture that is as daring as it is supportive.

Below are photos from the Programming Competition.

Second place Novice team 17 not pictured.

Please visit acmutd.co for more information on The UT Dallas ACM student chapter.