University of Chicago students compete in world championship computer programming contest March 7-11

University of Chicago students will vie with 60 teams from six continents in the 25th Annual World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Programming Contest March 7-11 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The University of Chicago team earned the right to compete in Vancouver by placing second among approximately 100 teams from 50 universities in the ACM’s Mid-Central Regional Programming Contest last November.

“What makes this a unique enterprise is the combination of structurally interesting problems and the need for absolute exactness in solving them,” said the team adviser, Michael O’Donnell, Professor in Computer Science.

The University’s team consists of Andrew Huntwork, a fourth-year in computer science from Chicago; Emil Ong, a December 2000 graduate in computer science from Muskogee, Okla.; and Daniel Robbins, a graduate student in physics from Beaumont, Alberta, Canada. The contest is sponsored by IBM. The Chicago team’s travel expenses will be paid by ThoughtWorks, a Chicago software company that employs several University alumni.

At the regional contest last November, teams had five hours to tackle six problems using C, C++, Pascal or Java programs. Students were judged according to how many problems they solved and how fast they solved them. The problems related to a variety of tasks, such as image processing, text formatting and solving puzzles. Only the first-place team managed to solve all six problems within the time limit at the regional contest.

“We were among five or six teams that solved five problems, and we were substantially ahead in terms of how quickly we solved the five,” O’Donnell said.

The Chicago team has been practicing weekly, using problems from previous contests. “Some innate talent is required, but students can improve a lot with practice and consideration of the peculiarities of the contest,” he said. “Time pressure is critical. Sensible people don’t write real programs in a day, much less an hour.”