Computer programming students head to Tokyo
"The Milk's Gone Bad," a team of three undergraduate students from the Virginia Tech College of Engineering, will compete in the World Finals of the Association of Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC) March 12-16 in Tokyo, Japan.
The Virginia Tech team is one of only 20 U.S. teams to win places in the world finals. The team members, all seniors, are Mike Henry, a computer engineering major from Fairfax, Va.; Cris Kania, a computer science major from Crozet, Va.; and Joel Riley, a computer science major from Ashburn, Va.
More than 6,099 teams representing 1,756 universities worldwide participated in regional competitions in 2006. The top 88 teams qualified for positions in the world finals, which will be hosted by IBM’s Tokyo Research Lab and the ACM Japan Chapter. The annual international contest is sponsored by IBM.
“The competition is going to be tough, but we have a solid team,” said Riley. “We've been practicing pretty hard for this, about five hours every Saturday morning during fall and spring semesters. Everyone on our team has been competing for two years or more, so that also helps.”
The Virginia Tech team will be competing against students from the best computer science schools in the world. Universities in the U.S. being represented include Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I hope we’ll be competitive with the other U.S. teams,” said Henry. “While it would be nice to get into to the top 15 and earn a cash prize, I would definitely be happy to win an honorable mention.”
Virginia Tech teams have participated in the ACM-ICPC contest for the past 25 years and have made it to the world finals for 23 of those years — and have usually won at least an honorable mention.
In October 2006, five Virginia Tech teams entered the ACM-ICPC Mid-Atlantic Regional competition. “The Milk’s Gone Bad” placed first among 135 teams representing 68 universities, thus winning the right to compete in the world finals.
All five Virginia Tech teams this year were coached by Joseph Gleason, a 2006 computer science graduate who participated in the ACM-ICPC competition while he was a student.
“The reason I enjoyed it as an undergraduate and enjoy it now is because it is fun code,” said Gleason, who currently works for EverGrid Inc., a computer software company. “The programming we do for these things can be fast and loose and somewhat crazy. The best programming team members are the ones who know a great deal of math and can write a few hundred lines of code without mistakes in about an hour. Those who can do this are way ahead of their peers when they go into the workforce.”
Kania, who is president of the Virginia Tech student chapter of ACM, explained the challenges of the competition. “On the contest floor, teams have to work rapidly and effectively to solve as many programming problems as possible,” he said. “The questions can touch on a variety of topics in computer science, math, or other fields. Multiple algorithms and techniques often have to be applied in order to solve a single problem.”
The programming problems at the world finals will present an even higher level of difficulty than those at the regional competition, Kania said.
For more information about Virginia Tech’s participation in the ACM-ICPC over the years, visit the ACM Programming Contest webpage.
The College of Engineering at Virginia Tech is internationally recognized for its excellence in 14 engineering disciplines and computer science. The college’s 5,500 undergraduates benefit from an innovative curriculum that provides a “hands-on, minds-on” approach to engineering education, complementing classroom instruction with two unique design-and-build facilities and a strong Cooperative Education Program. With more than 50 research centers and numerous laboratories, the college offers its 1,900 graduate students opportunities in advanced fields of study such as biomedical engineering, state-of-the-art microelectronics, and nanotechnology.
