Although I was not heavily involved in the ACM ICPC competitions this past Fall, I followed the Pacific Northwest regional quite closely. Several of my former students were competing for the University of Victoria team and of course my new university (Stanford) was also competing.
UVic had a great start to the competition, but ran into issues in the second half and ended up finishing in 9th. However, given that the university has only recently started competing in the ACM ICPC competitions, a 4th place finish in 2009 followed by a 9th place finish in 2010 is a pretty fantastic result.
The contest this year was quite interesting in a variety of ways. First, for the first time in a very long time the top team was not Stanford or the University of British Columbia. Second, although Stanford Red solved problem D at the 18 minute mark, there was 230 submissions for this problem, and only 3 were deemed correct. To anyone with much experience in these types of contests, this result looks a little fishy.
Rather than recap all the events and outcome, I’ll point you to Brad Bart’s (SFU coach) recounting and interpretation of the events: http://www.cs.sfu.ca/news/events/ACM/2010/.
I am personally not very happy with the way this screw up has been handled by the ACM ICPC. If you have an opinion, post it to the comments or better yet let ACM ICPC know what you think.
