The two UVic teams, Vikes White and Blue, participated in the Alberta Collegiate Programming Competition yesterday. The Whites team consisted of Dan Sanders, John Hawthorn, and Scott Porter, while the Blues had students Tim Song, Tristin Sturgess, and Tyler Cadigan. You can see the final scoreboard here.
It was a great competition and turn out, 37 teams participated. Vikes White was the top performing UVic team, finishing 9th overall with 8 of 10 problems solved. Vikes Blue finished 22nd overall with 3 problems solved. Stanford took first place, UBC second, and Waterloo was third, all with 9 problems solved.
Nick Matthijssen, a graduate student in the CHISEL research lab at UVic, and I also formed an unofficial team and worked on the problems. We solved 8 of 10 in about 4 hours and would have finished 5th or 6th.
Both teams had a good start, the Whites solved their first problem at 13 minutes while the Blues got one at 20 minutes. Things slowed down for both teams for a while, and eventually both had 3 problems solved and were stuck with getting a 4th. Eventually the Whites really stepped up the pace during the third and fourth hour, solving 4 problems in 70 minutes. The Blues got stuck with problem F, and were never able to figure out the cause of the wrong answers.
I was extremely proud of both teams. Waterloo, UBC, and Stanford will most likely be some of the top teams at the world finals this coming year, so to lose by one problem to those teams is certainly acceptable. It’s good company to keep :-).
One of the most amazing things about the Whites team is that they received zero penalties for wrong answers. They were the only team that solved a significant amount problems to receive no penalties. This kind of precision could be a huge asset at regionals next month if they can solve some problems a little faster.
Since this post is already quite lengthy, I’ll save the problem analysis for a separate post.
