On Saturday, November 2, 2013, three BYU–Hawaii students took first place in the Hawaii site of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, arguably the most recognized programming contest for university student programmers in the world. Peniette Seru (from Fiji), Thomas Lowry (from the Cook Islands), and Meilan Jin (from China), all seniors majoring in Computer Science, were members of the winning team.
For the past ten years, BYU–Hawaii has been the host university for the Hawaii site, inviting teams from Hawaii Pacific University (HPU) and University of Hawaii–Hilo (UH–Hilo) to compete the first Saturday of November every year. This year, 14 three-person teams competed in Laie, five from BYU–Hawaii, six from HPU, and three from UH–Hilo.
The contest lasts five hours and requires teams to write a series of computer programs to solve a packet of story problems typically dealing with math, geometry, or graph theory. Teams are then ranked based on how many problems they solve. Seru, Lowry, and Jin’s team solved five of the 13 problems, more than any other team at the Hawaii site. With this score, they were also ranked 24th out of the 117 teams that competed in the Pacific Northwest Region of the ACM International Contest. The Pacific Northwest Region includes universities in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Northern California.
“This is a big deal for our university. It has been several years since BYU–Hawaii won the Hawaii site contest, probably because HPU sends graduate students while BYU–Hawaii of course only has undergrads,” stated Dr. Geoffrey Draper, an assistant professor in BYU–Hawaii’s Computer & Information Sciences department. “What is perhaps more impressive is our ranking of 24th in the region. The Pacific Northwest regional contest includes universities such as Stanford and UC Berkeley, which have some of the most prestigious Computer Science departments in the world. For BYU–Hawaii to rank 24th out of 117 teams, many of which included graduate students, is a wonderful achievement.”
Seru, Lowry, and Jin prepared for the competition by studying hard in their computer science classes and coming up with a strategy. “One of the classes we are taking now helped a lot with this year's contest,” said Jin. “Our team's strategy was for Thomas, who is really good at coding and solving problems, to start to code the first problem while Penny and I read through the rest of problems and ranked them from easiest to most difficult. After we solved the easier problems, we tried to get together and solve the harder problems. We work really well together as a team. I had a lot fun during this year's competition.”
Jin hopes that her team’s success will encourage more students who are interested in programming to join the Computer Science major. Dr. Draper explained that the first and second place winners of the Pacific Northwest Region contest go to Ekaterinburg, Russia, next year to compete in the world finals. “To my knowledge, no team from the Hawaii site has ever gone on to the world finals,” he said. “Maybe next year.”
To learn more about the Pacific Northwest Region portion of the contest, visit http://www.acmicpc-pacnw.org/. To learn more about the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, visit http://icpc.baylor.edu/welcome.icpc.