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This is the middle rung of the
International Collegiate Programming Contest sponsored by
ACM and IBM. The first rung takes place at the University
level where different teams compete to see who will
represent their University at the regional levels. However,
our region places no restriction on the number of teams
competing from any given school, so, at present, our "first
rung" competition is treated as a practice contest. We held
our practice contest on Saturday 25 October 2008 in the New
Science Facility, and the ranked results were sent to the
regionals only to establish priority in room assignments.
There are 38 Regions and each region hosts a programming
contest. Our region is the North Central North America
region, comprised of Universities in Minnesota, Wisconsin,
Western Ontario, Manitoba, Iowa, North Dakota, South |
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Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and the
Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Because each region is large, it is
convenient to hold the regional competition at a number of
sites scattered throughout the region; the NCNA regional
contest is held simultaneously at fifteen sites. NMU
competed at the LSSU site, along with teams from Lake
Superior State University, Michigan Technological
University, and Algoma University College. Twenty-one teams
competed at this site.
Representing Northern Michigan
University were:
DON'T PANIC: Paul D. Erickson,
Brian J. Krent
JAVA JUNKIES: Matthew S. Gregory, Evan B. O'Jack, Kyle A.
Wiering
PENDING: Joshua M. Cook, Matt Knox, Esther M. Su
TEAM VENTURE: Jaclyn R. Beck, David E. Lyon
THESE CATS DON'T DANCE: Amy R. Elliott, Cory R. Perry,
Scotlyn H. Smith
The contest consists of nine
problems to be solved in a five-hour period. Teams are
ranked by the number of problems they successfully complete;
ties are broken in favor of the teams which solved the
problems more quickly, after penalties are factored in for
submitting incorrect solutions.
Normally, what I do at the ACM
contest is pore over the problems looking for errors, either
minor typographical errors, or critical errors, such as
disagreement of input and output data that would render a
problem completely unsolvable. The NCNA problems are
notorious for this kind of error, and a couple of years ago
I actually caught and corrected one such critical error in
time to notify the competitors so that they would have a
chance of solving it.
This year, however, the LSSU staff
asked me to man the judging station to judge the submissions
as they came in. In the past, LSSU has had two or three
judging stations, but, for whatever reason, this year they
only had one. Now, we have only a single judging station at
NMU, but our judging process is handled electronically by a
sophisticated piece of software that I wrote and have
maintained over the last decade. The LSSU people and the
ACM people have no such software, and a lot of the work is
still done by hand and by eye. I mention all this because
working the judging station for five hours without my
accustomed software support has to be one of the most
arduous activities in the area of academic competition that
I have ever performed! For the most part, things went
smoothly; however, one of the problems (problem four) had a
seven-page output--making it impossible to hand grade--and
there was a formatting error in the electronic copy of the
output--making it impossible to grade electronically. So,
Evan Schemm from LSSU investigated that problem while I
graded all the other problems. Except for problem four,
turnaround time was quite reasonable.
Anyway, NMU did quite well in the
contest:
At the "first rung" (practice
contest), Java Junkies took first place, These Cats Don't
Dance took second, Pending took third, Team Venture took
fourth, and Don't Panic took fifth.
At the LSSU site, out of twenty-one
teams competing, These Cats Don't Dance took third place,
Java Junkies took eighth, Don't Panic took twelfth, Pending
took fourteenth, and Team Venture took sixteenth. Out of
nine problems, every one of the NMU teams solved at least
two problems, and our top-scoring team, These Cats Don't
Dance, solved four.
Teams from MTU took first and second
at the site contest.
Within the entire NCNA region, these
scores have not yet been certified and so the results are
approximate. Two hundred two teams are listed as competing
(but some of these might not have shown up) and These Cats
Don't Dance took seventy-third, Java Junkies took one
hundred second, Don't Panic took one hundred twenty-fourth,
Pending took one hundred fifty-first, and Team Venture took
one hundred fifty-sixth.
Incidentally, this is an interesting
disparity. Our top team took third out of twenty-one teams
at the site, so that we were in the top seventh.
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Regionally, though, it took seventy-third out of two hundred
two, not even the top third. In other words, Upper
Peninsula teams underperformed as a whole this year. This
would appear to be anomalous; generally speaking, the
disparity is seldom this poor. My suspicion is that the
easier-than-usual problems this year shot scores through the
roof all over the region, making speed more of the issue
than coding strategy. I know, as a coach, I didn't focus
enough on speed this time because NMU's teams usually gain
the advantage by knowing strategies for difficult problems
that other teams might not. Oh well. (Yes, I am aware that
we are competing against schools in higher tiers throughout
the region, and that certainly accounts for some of the
disparity, but not all of it. It's not unusual for our top
team to perform in the top twenty or thirty region-wide.)
No team from the LSSU site qualified to compete in the
"final rung," the World Finals competition held this year in
Stockholm, Sweden. The first-place team from the NCNA |
Coach Poe (right) and students discuss
strategy |
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region was Incendiary Pigs, from The
University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
For those interested in such
demographic statistics, of our thirteen competitors, four
were female. The only female competitors at the LSSU site
were from NMU. Our top-scoring team, These Cats Don't
Dance, was comprised of two women and one man.
Anyway, the students had a blast, it
was great fun, and we're looking forward to the next contest
at NMU in March!
--Andrew A. (Andy) Poe, Assoc. Prof. |
