Last weekend in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest regional, Hopkins teams took 1st and 3rd place locally among the thirteen teams that participated, as well as 5th and 61st regionally in a competition which took place on campus.
The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is run by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a professional organization for computer science. Hopkins has a very active university chapter that is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. The local chapter worked with the regional ACM group to help run the competition last weekend.
The competition, which is in its 34th year, consists of regional and international levels. Winners of regional competitions go on to compete in the international competition. The regional competition is run at a few different local sites; however, for the purposes of advancing to the international championships, scores are looked at regionally. IBM sponsors the competition which has over 2,000 participant universities.
To advance in the competition, the teams need to solve problems that range from special relativity to figuring out what percentage of a room a security camera can see. They need to write a computer code to solve these problems. The code is then submitted to an offsite location where it is tested against a large set of data. The teams are scored based on how quickly they can solve the problems and on how many problems that they get right.
The Hopkins teams made a comeback after placing behind University of Maryland College Park last year. Junior Juneki Hong believes that an increase in practices helped contribute to the Hopkins teams' success. "Unlike last year, we went over old problems on a few Friday nights. I think that this contributed to helping us do better," Hong said.
Juneki Hong, Mike Coupet and Yevgeniy Rudoy took 1st place locally and 5th place regionally. Paul O'Neil, Michael Tango and Spencer Ong took 3rd place locally and 61st regionally. The finals this year are going to take place in Poland. The JHU teams would have needed to place 3rd or better regionally to be able to attend.
