Greg and Kat's blog

Brief background: The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) sponsors an annual worldwide programming contest. The contest format is 5+ problems, generally all tricky algorithmic problems, solve ’em, GO! Teams with more problems correctly completed in the given time win; ties are broken by penalty points (incorrect submissions and time taken to complete problems).

Brad (our coach) and the UBC coach often organize a spring warmup/practice/fun contest for our students. For the last two years, Ted Kirkpatrick and I have entered as a team.

Competing against students can go one of two general ways:

1. Oh ha ha, you’re better at DDR than me.
2. This contest seems to involve logic/reasoning/intelligence: exactly the stuff I’m supposed to be better at than my students so I can teach them. Failure is not an option.

ACM-like contests are distinctly in the second category.

This presents an interesting challenge. Primarily, the students who are into the ACM contest are really into it and are quite good. Ted and I spend a lot more time writing lecture notes than programs.

Last year, we finished below the really competitive teams, and above the rest of the students. That’s the best we could have hoped for, really.

This year’s contest was today. Once again, two SFU teams bested us, completing 4/6 problems. We completed 3/6.

I cost us 20 minutes debugging a stupid mistake in fraction arithmetic. If not for that, we definitely would have finished a fourth problem (but not changed our ranking because of penalty points).

I’m more annoyed at another problem that neither Ted or I saw how to do. All you had to do was tilt your head the right way and say “Oh, it’s graph theory. I’ll just look up the formula and type it in.” Me and my undergrad in math and masters in graph-theoretic network algorithms didn’t notice that.

I hope Art doesn’t find out. Anyway, we should have had 4/6 and if I had really been on top of my game, it might have been 5/6. [shakes fist]