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Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology computer science majors Jeff Stuart and Matthew Iverson won first place in the pairs division of the 2008 Carnegie Mellon University Spring Programming Contest, hosted by Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science with support from Google Inc.
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Winning Programming Pair: A little power supply malfunction couldn't keep Jeff Stuart (left) and Matthew Iverson from winning the recent Carnegie Mellon University Spring Programming Contest, one of the nation's top competitions for undergraduate computer science students. |
Thirty-four two-and three-member teams from 17 colleges and universities participated March 29 in the fifth annual competition, which complements the computer programming competition sponsored each fall by the Association of Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest. Each team was presented with a set of 12 problems based on a Harry Potter theme. For each problem, the teams had to identify an appropriate problem-solving method, or algorithm, design a data set and produce a computer program to solve the problem.
Stuart, a senior from Cincinnati, Ohio, and Iverson, a sophomore from Centerville, Ind., set the tone early in the competition with the first correct submission within the first seven minutes. The duo built on their lead with another correct answer at 17 minutes. Then, adversity struck when the power supply on the team's computer failed.
"Wisely, the team had been saving its work regularly, but still lost about 15 minutes while the staff moved the machine to a location with a working power supply," noted Laurence Merkle, assistant professor of computer science and software engineering and the team's coach.
Although the technical malfunction caused it to be passed by other teams briefly on two occasions, the Rose-Hulman team spent most of the afternoon at the top of the leader board.
To maintain the suspense of the competition, the board was frozen with 30 minutes left in the contest, with Rose-Hulman and two other teams correctly solving nine of the 12 problems. Stuart and Iverson were in the lead because of the time-based tiebreaker system. That turned out to be enough to win the pairs division, but not quite enough to beat Bowling Green State University, the three-person team champions with 10 correct problems solved, for the overall grand champion title.
The problems ranged in difficulty from those that might be assigned as in-class exercises early in an introductory programming course to those that might be assigned as weekly homework problems in an advanced algorithms course, noted Merkle. Problems were developed by Eugene Fink, senior systems scientist in Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department and the Language Technologies Institute.
After graduation in May, Stuart plans to work for Green Hills Software, a leading provider of real-time operating systems software. Iverson is still looking for a summer internship to further his experiences in the computer science field.
More information about the Carnegie Mellon Spring Programming Contest is available at: http://courseweb.sp.cs.cmu.edu/~contest/invitational/2008/. |
