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ACM Programming Contest |
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York University sent two teams to the ACM regional contest at Sheridan College in Oakville on November 6, 2004. Our two teams were The Gnu Yorkers (Enrico Bianco, Stefan Ihnatesn and Thang Le) and The York Yeomen (Donald Duhaney, Foad Hamidi and Damon Sotoudeh-Hosseini).
The Gnu Yorkers: Stefan, Enrico and Thang
The York Yeomen: Damon, Donald and Foad
The competition was very tough this year: only two schools managed to solve more than 4 of the 8 problems. The Gnu Yorkers placed 28th out of 133 teams, and the Yeomen placed 55th. The problem sets and standings are available at the regional contest web site. Congratulations to all of our team members!
The final practice contest for this
2004 took place on Thursday, October 14.
The eighth practice contest was held on September 29. It seems to have been a bit harder than usual. Only Enrico Bianco got onto the scoreboard this time. Solutions and test files
The seventh practice contest was held on Wednesday, September 22. The top three students were Andrew Vorozcovs, Enrico Bianco and Feng Xie. Solutions and test files
The sixth practice
contest was held on Wednesday, September 15. The top students were Enrico Bianco, Andrew Vorozcovs, David Block and Feng Xie. Solutions and test files are now available.
The fifth practice
contest was held on Wednesday, July 21st. The top students were Thang Minh Le, Feng Xie and Enrico Bianco. Solutions and test files are now available.
The fourth practice
contest of the year was held on Wednesday, June 2nd. Due to some technical
problems, there are no official results, but thanks to everybody that came out!
The third practice contest was held on March 17. The top students were Feng Xie and Stefan Ihnatesn.
Solutions and test files are now available.
The second practice contest of 2004 was held on Wednesday, March 3.
The top students were Andreas Katsiapis, Enrico Bianco and Stefan Ihnatesn.
Solutions and test files are now available.
The first practice contest of 2004 was held on Wednesday, January 28.
The top students were Andreas Katsiapis, Enrico Bianco, Stefan Ihnatesn and David Block.
Solutions and test files are now available.
If you want to get involved with the contest, contact one of the coaches (see below) to get on the mailing list.
Pictures and information about last year's regional contest is still available. (See this link too.)
Quick facts
The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is a problem-solving contest
held at local, regional and world levels. The ACM Programming Contest is sponsored by IBM
and held every fall. York typically sends 2 teams to the contest. Teams are chosen by the
coaches on the basis of several contests held in the Computer Science Dept. The team members
go through intensive preparations (supervised by the coaches) to hone their problem-solving
and programming skills and teamwork. We performed remarkably well last year and hope to
achieve similar levels of excellence this year.
The practice contests that we hold at York are a good way to improve
your problem solving and coding skills. They're also fun, challenging
and a good way to get involved in the social life of the department.
Please come to the information session to find out more about
participating. All undergraduates (and graduate students)
are welcome to attend.
Coaches: Prof. Suprakash Datta, Prof. Eric Ruppert, Prof Bil Tzerpos
[email id's: (respectively) datta, ruppert, bil]
Frequently Asked Questions
Resources
The following are all great resources for the contest.
Problem archives
- The past problems from our regional contest are here (2002), here (2001) , here (2000) and
here
(1999).
- For many world finals problems, see here.
- There is a very comprehensive archive of contest problems here.
- There is a large archive of contest and practice problems here (over 1000 problems!).
- Another source of problems is here.
Teamwork, strategies etc.
- There is also some good info about teamwork here.
- Some common mistakes
in programming contests.
Books
- Steven S. Skiena and Miguel A. Revilla. Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual. Springer, 2003. Available in the Steacie Library.
- Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest and Clifford Stein. Introduction to Algorithms. MIT Press/McGraw-Hill, 2001. If you haven't already taken 3101, this is the textbook you'll be using there, so you can get a head start by looking through it. It has lots of algorithms that are useful for contest questions.
- George Polya. How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method. Princeton University Press, 1945. A discussion of problem-solving techniques, more geared towards mathematics than computer science, but still useful.
- Robert Sedgewick. Algorithms in C++ (2 volumes). Addison-Wesley, 1998. Lots of useful algorithms, a few with actual implementations that you can just type in (in C++).
- G.H. Gonnet and R. Baeza-Yates. Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures in Pascal and C. Another book of useful algorithms with actual code. But half the algorithms are in Pascal and the other half in C.
- There are a ton (perhaps literally) of introductory algorithms books in the library.
- It really, really helps to pick your favourite manual for the language of your choice, and then really become familiar with it so that you can find things in it quickly when you need to. (This is not just advice for the contest, but for life.)
Contest Links
- The regional contest for York and other nearby universities is the
East Central Regional contest,
which has several satellite contests. Our team will compete at the
satellite contest at Sheridan College in Oakville.
- The WWW page for the (global) ACM Programming Contest is here.
- The web page for practice contests at Waterloo are here.
- Here
is a short (unofficial) summary of the contest rules.
- Here is a link to
tutorials and DOS executables for editors used in the contest environment.
This page is maintained by
Prof. Suprakash Datta (email: xxxxx@cs.yorku.ca - substitute datta for xxxxx)