2003 ICPC Results

The competition at the Adelaide site continues to grow. This year we fielded 13 teams: 6 from Flinders, 4 from UniSA, and 3 from Adelaide. It was pleasing to see 4 quite competitive second-year-only teams this year, which bodes well for next year’s comp.

The contest started right on time and ran without a hitch, thanks to the thorough preparation of Site Technician Trent Lewis. And thanks to the prompt and careful work of Site Judges Brad Alexander and Takeshi Matsumoto, with help from balloon runners and helpers-at-large Stewart Itzstein and Darius Pfitzner, the judging also proceeded smoothly.

The contest got off to a flying start, with 4 teams submitting correct solutions to problem 1 inside the first 10 minutes (and one also getting problem 2 out after only 20 minutes). In fact, the judges (and balloon  runners) were kept quite busy for the first hours, with 30 correct solutions accepted by that time. Teams found problems 1, 2 and 3 the easiest, with all teams solving problem 1 inside the first hour, and most getting problem 2 inside the first 90 minutes and problem 3 by the 2-hour mark. By the end, all teams had at least 2 problems out.

The pace dropped off considerably after about the mid-way point, with teams tackling the more difficult problems. But the arrival of the pizzas provided some welcome relief and the teams went back to it with a vengeance. For a while we had 6 teams on 4 problems; clearly it was a race to see who could get the 5th solution. “Sigsegv” from Flinders was the first, submitting their 5th correct solution at the 208 minute mark and heading the scoreboard until “UniSA team 2″ equaled them at the 234 minute mark. But it was the late charge from last-year’s defending champions ” Adelaide team 1″, solving problem 9 at the 289 minute mark, that leap-frogged them into the winning position. And despite the usual last-minute flurry of attempts, no body was able to dislodge them.

So despite the best efforts of the well-prepared and well-turned-out UniSA contingent (thanks again to coach Stewart Itzstein), and a concerted push from the local Flinders teams (thanks to ex-contestant now turned coach Takeshi Matsumoto), the University of Adelaide (coached by Brad Alexander) again took away the Golden Ukulele. But going by the determined look on the faces of several of the second-year contestants, they’re going to be hard put to hold on to it next year!

Overall, most people reported that they enjoyed the day, found the contest worthwhile and stimulating, and would be interested in competing again in future.

We had 16 teams competing at the Auckland University of Technology this year, teams coming from Hamilton and Wellington as well as Auckland.

Technical problems meant we started an hour late, but once these were overcome the contest ran smoothly. Every team managed to solve at least 3 problem which was great. Our champion team was “A Handshaking Llama” from University of Waikato who solved 5 problems. Special mention must also be made of our second placed team, “Null” from University of Auckland, made up of year 1 students. They solved problem 9 and only had to solve problem 4 to become New Zealand Champions!

Thanks to Professor Felix Tan who opened proceedings, to Radu Nicolescu, Michael Dinneen and Bill Rogers who acted as judges, to Peter Kay, Gordon Grimsey and Kyongho Min who helped on the contest floor, to Art Brown, Brian Green, Libby Perrett, Aakriti Sharma and Sunita Taneja who managed the technical side of the event, and to Boris Bacic who took the team photographs. Thanks to IBM for their sponsorship, and to ACM for organising the event, and to our special guest ACM lecturer, professor Don Gotterbarn, who presented the prizes.

This year the Canberra site had four teams competing from the ANU. It would be great to get some teams from The University of Canberra and ADFA in next years competition (assuming they are up to the challenge!).

Team Atra (from ANU) did well getting off to a flying start, however, their lead was eventually clawed back by Silver (from ANU) and Orange (from ANU). All the teams solved the first three problems in under 1 hour and 20 minutes. However, from this point on the task before the teams became considerably more difficult. Interestingly there was only a small number of incorrect solutions submitted. On the problems that the teams successfully completed they only submitted their solutions once. So the only incorrect solutions submitted were on problem teams never successfully completed. This was a nice demonstration of Software Engineering, as teams were able get their programs right the first time. It also made judging easier! Silver (from ANU) winning in the Canberra area with a total of 6 of the 9 problems out.

Overall the contest ran very smoothly, with the pc2 software not causing any problems. Many thanks to Bob Edwards for organizing and setting up the computers and their environment (and for getting the pizza!). Overall everyone concerned found this a challenging and enjoyable day.

The contest went fine, after sorting out the end of line problems associated with running the server on an NT machine and the judges and teams on Linux boxes. This year Stewart Fleming could not act as Technical Director as he was involved with a sister’s wedding in Edinburgh and a duathlon in Switzerland (in the middle of the European heat wave), so Nick Meek occupied the hot seat. We eliminated the problems with the “Run” button in PC^2 by informing the teams that it did not/would not work and leaving them to test their programs from the command line. (Oh that we could have done the same, we had to anyway most of the time.)

The next hiccup came when a sharp-eyed team realised that there was a problem with the sample input and output data for Problem 6. I fixed the output data file, but was not aware that the input file needed fixing also, as I thought that the input was coming in unsorted. This caused many problems for the top two teams in particular, one of whom lost nearly an hour on this.
Congratulations to all teams who entered. Thanks to a good range of questions, all teams got at least 3 problems out. Special congratulations to The Pumpkin Lemma (Bartosz Fabianowski, Birger Brunswiek and Phil Mcleod) as worthy site winners and NZ Champions. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if we had had fewer problems — they were under half an hour from solving two more problems. Congratulations also to Indra’s Pearls from Canterbury who were doughty contestants. It was a close run thing in the end.

Thanks to Nick Meek for setting up PC^2 and nursing it through its hissy fits and also supervising the revision of the data files to conform to Linux expectations; to Cathy Chandra our Linux sysadmin who kept everything going and checked for inappropriate network behaviour by the teams; to Ken Sutton, Andrew Trotman and Ramakrishnan Mukundan for coaching; and finally to Allan Hayes and Malcolm Mills for setting up the site in The Link (outside the University Library) and then taking it all down again at the end of the day.

All the best to the team in Prague next year. It should be a good contest with the UNSW team.

In many respects this year’s event in Launceston was very similar to the last few – starting at about the right time, continuing without major incident, and ending with the site being clearly won by the team containing the entrant with the most previous site championships (Michael Horton). Congratulations are thus due to “Wirthless” (Adam Hill, Daniel Hedlund and Michael) on their impressive performance, which will probably see them do well in the regional placings when the results are finalised.

With every team at the site solving at least 3 problems, praise is due to all entrants for their creditable performance. However, “Elephant Fresh” (Charles O’Farrell, Dmitry Kamenetsky and Rowan Martin-Hughes) deserve special mention, for being closely behind “Wirthless” in the early stages and ultimately finishing second on site, which is particularly noteworthy as they were the only team all of whose members were first time participants in the event.

Thanks are due to the head judge for yet another well prepared problem set, to the ACM and IBM for organisation and sponsorship, and to those who helped out on the site on the day and before as well:

Tony Gray (Technical Director), Robyn Gibson (Judge), Andrew Spilling (Technician, Pizza Fetcher, etc.) and Christian McGee (Technician). Thanks also to Raelene Couch (for help before the event) and Ian Lewis (for coaching two of the entered teams).

The Melbourne site of the competition ran with no problems. There were no technical glitches, the environment worked well, the judging was done without difficulties, and the responses reached the teams very quickly. There was only a small problem at the beginning with the compilation and running of Java files, due to a configuration mistake, so teams were instructed to work on the command line for a llittle while. After some quick exploration, Fabian discovered and solved the misconfiguration, and PC^2 worked fine after that.

When the error on the data file for the Phones problem was discovered, we told the team with that problem pending that we believed that their answer was OK, and to proceed with the others. We did so because we modified the data file to remove the wrong section, and their answer checked out OK when running ‘diff’ on the command line.

Our congratulations to all the participating teams, especially to the Melbourne site winners, Melbourne University A (Lars Yencken, Grant Byers and Peter Hawkins, 6 problems, 479 minutes), and to the worthy second place getters Melbourne University B (In-Ho Ye, Jesse Neave, Kieran Rowe, 5 problems, 447 minutes). Also, it was very good to see teams from La Trobe University Bendigo doing so well in third place (Corin Lawson, Levi Cameron, Jamie Aisbett, 4 problems, 423 minutes) and Victoria University in fourth (Alfie John, Thanh Lam, and Vasantha Crabb, 4 problems, 448 minutes). Congratulations to their coaches as well, John Dethridge, Paul Goddard and Khalil Shihab.

We had many people helping out with judging, coordinating and just doing general chores. Our special thanks to John Dethridge, Paul Goddard, Michael Ciavarella, Pablo Rossi for the judging, and to Kim Patton and Samantha DiBenedetto for their administrative support before and during the competition.

Looking forward to the next one!

Fabian Iannarella (Technical Coordinator)
Mirka Borowska (Melbourne Site Director)
George Fernandez (Australian Contest Director)

The Perth contest was held in a different venue than normal this year, due to the larger number of teams this year. We had 17 teams, which is a record number for Perth (this is with one university not fielding teams). The contest started an hour late due to small problems. After this though, everything ran smoothly. With food and drinks available, kindly set up by Jacqueline Allen, teams were able to settle into solving problems, in a spacious area, with nice views.
This year we were honoured to have Raewyn Boerson attend our site and we would like to extend our thanks to Raewyn for all her assistance. We would also like to thank our Judges; Dr. Luigi Barone (UWA), Dr. Brian Von Konsky (Curtin University) and Dr. Nicola Ritter (Murdoch University). We would also like to thank Megan Cole for helping during the competition.

The local winners successfully defended last year’s title to win locally back-to-back. They consisted of two thirds of the original team. They were Coders of The Lookup Table from UWA (Bernard Blackham, Jim Mussared and Mark Rankilor, 4 problems in 350 minutes), followed by A Curtin Miracle from Curtin (Edwin Wong, Jeremy Wong and Kent Yip, 4 problems in 458 minutes) and No Idea, also from UWA (Lixin Chin, Rohan Joyce and Thomas Castiglione, 4 problems in 584 minutes). Coders of The Lookup Table finished equal 20th position nationally.

All teams managed to complete one problem, which is a better result than last year. The top Murdoch team was Tech Corp with 3 problems in 287 minutes.

The only exclusively first year team was NDB (Freshies) from Murdoch University.
SiteTechnical Director: Royce Jenkins
Site Director: Peter Cole

It is a great relief for me to write, on the morning after, that everything went well in the Sydney site during the 2003 South Pacific Regional Contest.

The contest started 10 minutes later than the noon scheduled time to allow for everyone to settle down and get access to their accounts. We had 4 teams from Macquarie University and 11 teams from University of New South Wales. University of Sydney teams’ traditional presence was sadly missed but I am sure they will be back, along with other NSW universities, for the 2004 South Pacific Programming contest.

Radu’s selection of problems got the teams excited and going early with over 30 submissions in the first hours. The arrival of the first Pizza delivery at 1:30 p.m. generated another barrage of submissions which kept the three judges (Alexandre Mah, Keith So and Sharon Tam ) busy for the first two hours.

The computer system and PC^2 went about doing their job well due to the superb planning and testing by Simon Bowden (the site technical director), who spent most of the contest time enjoying the fruits of his earlier work not to mention the fruits (real ones, that is). The pace slowed down. The second Pizza delivery at 3:30 managed to generate more submissions. Unfortunately only 9 submissions were judged as correct in the last 2 hours of the contest. During the 5 hours of the contest, members of the ACM student chapter (Chairy Chiu Ying Cheung, Seng Lin Shee, Navjot Garcha, Venkatesh Kanchan, Irene Lo, Umar, June Yin, Chien-Chin Yong ) maintained the supply of print-outs, food and drinks available. Many thanks for running a smooth and calm competition environment.

After 5 hours, we had 64 correct answers from a total of 132 submissions. The minimum number of solved problems by a single team was 3 problems and the maximum number was 8. The top five teams (as judged locally) received prizes supplied by the competition sponsor (IBM).