BYU–Hawaii and three other Hawaii universities competed against each other and several other universities across North America in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), a contest put on by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) on Saturday, Nov. 14.
Each school sent multiple teams of three students to compete. Though none of the Hawaii teams made it through the regional portion of the competition, everyone who participated said they had a lot of fun and many plan to compete again next year.
The ICPC is a yearly competition where students are given five hours to solve 10-12 computer programming problems.
“This is a very prestigious contest. Its sponsoring organization, ACM, is the oldest computer society in the world. IBM, Facebook and other companies also provide financial support to this contest. Students who do well are likely to be recruited by respected software companies and graduate schools,” said Geoffrey Draper, one of the key organizers of the event.
Programming teams from BYU–Hawaii, The University of Hawaii-Manoa, Hawaii Pacific University, and The University of Hawaii-Hilo competed against teams from California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Columbia as part of the Pacific Northwest regional division of the worldwide ICPC tournament.
The top two teams from each region will be given the opportunity to advance to the finals where they will be competing against collegiate programmers from all over the world. The competition was divided into two difficulty levels, division one offering a more difficult question set, and division two being slightly more forgiving, said Keith Edwards, who coaches the UH-Hilo programming team.
Punahou High School student Mark Kleine worked without a team and was the only high school student in the contest. He drew a lot of attention from rival programmers and officiators alike as he single-handedly programmed his way to finish in fourth place in division two. The three higher places were won by non-Hawaii teams.
“I’ve done a lot of practice tests online and looked up a few intros to algorithms. The problems I faced today were pretty close to the ones I practiced with so there were quite a few that I knew how to solve right away, but there were some that took a bit more time,” explained Kleine.
Kleine was able to solve nine out of the eleven questions presented, which is a very brag-worthy accomplishment when “even solving 1 or 2 of them is quite an achievement,” said Draper.
Cameron Mairs, a freshman from New York studying computer science said, “[Programming] is literally its own language, so a lot of knowing what to do is just understanding the language.”
Mairs described the competition’s problems as, “very like a logic puzzle, but instead of looking at it and solving it yourself, you have to tell someone else exactly what to do every step of the way and if you make one mistake, it will not work at all.”
Marcos Icaza, a senior from Michigan studying computer science, said, “I think this [prepares] you a lot for real interview challenges. I have gone to interviews [that] are like this; the company will give you a problem so they can see how quickly you solve it and how you code. This gives you real practice because many of the challenges are real-world challenges.”
For a full list of competitors’ scores and to learn more about the ICPC, visit https://icpc.baylor.edu/