Computing Club Won't Advance to Contest Finals

The Harvard Computing Contest Club placed a disappointing sixth out of 13 teams at the 2001 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest’s regional competition this Saturday in Westfield, Mass.

By virtue of Saturday’s results, Harvard will not attend the ACM World Finals for the first time since 1997 and only the second time in the past 10 years. The Northeast regional contest is one of dozens around the world and of the approximately 2,800 original teams, 64 move on to the ACM World Finals by placing either first or second in regional competition.

The yearly battle of computing brains challenges each team to program solutions to seven problems within the span of five hours. Contestants were asked this year to create, among other things, a program that simulated a bingo game and a program that decided whether two words were anagrams.

The three members of the team, computer science concentrators Brendan D. Connell ’02, Yuen-Jong Liu ’04 and Vladimir S. Novakovski ’05, were selected in an October contest of the Harvard Computing Contest Club which was open to the entire Harvard community.

Liu said that because of the time contraint, this kind of contest is “interesting, because it is entirely different from the normal way you learn computing.”

Teams were awarded points at yesterday’s competition when judges deemed a program acceptable; if a program was accepted from more than one team, the first submissions received the most points.

Harvard submitted two problems correctly, while the winner MIT submitted five.

The Harvard team’s advisor, Lecturer in Computer Science Robert Walton, said that “[All teams suffered from the fact that] the judging software did not work, and the contest had to be run by hand. The environment was very difficult for everyone involved.”