On Saturday night, in the cool dungeon-like space of the EMU computer lab, computer science students from eight Northwest schools began a five-hour competition to test their knowledge and understanding of programming. The Battle of the Brains had commenced.
Each year, the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC) brings more than 250 young computer programmers to five sites from Canada to Hawaii to compete in the 2009 Pacific Northwest Regional Contest. The contest is repeated across the globe in six continents to find the smartest programmers to compete at the world finals in China in February 2010.
But University junior Andrew Bruce and sophomore Elijah Hamovitz, members of one of three teams representing the University, had their sights set on beating a certain purple-and-gold team a little closer to home. Their team’s name, My Little PWNies, was derived from their desire “to own” the competition with sheer humor.
“The (University of Washington) beat us pretty bad last year,” Bruce said. “This year there is no team I would like to beat more. It would feel so satisfying.”
The two said they have spent 10 to 20 hours per week preparing for this contest, and it was time that Hamovitz believed was well spent.
“You have to be geeky enough to think that this is cool,” Hamovitz said. “We spend all this time for five hours of programming. I mean, it’s pretty geeky.”
David Atkins, an adjunct associate professor for the Computer and Information Sciences department, acted as the site director for the University’s competition.
Atkins said the problems students are given generally require a program that takes some input and produces output. This year’s theme, Star Wars, is incorporated into every problem so that teams must help Luke Skywalker and Han Solo calculate the distance between two star systems or solve a puzzle from the Blenjeel Boot Camp.
When a team thinks it has written a correct program, they submit the program to the judges. The judges will give back a response of “yes” or “no,” at which point the team must figure out what went wrong and resubmit. Once a team answers correctly, a colored balloon is tied behind its seats.
“The contests test the ability to analyze the problem, design a way to solve it, and quickly code a program that implements their design,” Atkins said. “Successfully competing in the contest requires the ability to design and program algorithms that are correct and fast enough.”
With two hours left, teams were huddled around a single computer, racing against the clock in a battle of logic, strategy and mental endurance.
Jimmy Hastings, a 2009 University graduate, prowled the rows of computers during the competition ensuring that no team was tempted to cheat. Hastings, in a green and gold “programming” cape that reached the floor, said most teams separate the stack of questions according to each problem’s difficulty and then continue to check the scoreboard to see what problems have been easier for other teams.
“With an hour left in the competition the (scoreboard) will freeze so no one will know who’s ahead,” Hastings said. “The teams will probably work out bugs and fix what they have submitted, but depending on the problem, starting new algorithms wouldn’t be wise.”
Last year, Stanford University won the Pacific Northwest ICPC Region and put an end to a string of five consecutive victories by the University of British Columbia. Along with UC Berkeley, these schools have dominated the region winning all but two of the competitions since 1994. In that time, the University and UW have managed only one victory each.
At the end of five hours, the University of British Columbia took first, completing all 10 problems. Teams from Stanford University placed second and third, and University of Washington teams took fifth and sixth.
Team My Little PWNies placed 35th at the end of the contest, after solving four problems, behind all three UW teams, but that didn’t prevent wide smiles of exhaustion that spread across their faces.
“When I started school I didn’t know what I wanted to do or that contests like this exist, but this is what I’m good at,” Hamovitz said. “I’m a geek and I’ve accepted that.”
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