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Sat., Oct. 27, 2007
Like doing your programming assignments at the last minute? Enjoy the thrill of trying to solve the problem before the impending deadline?
Then why not give programming contests a try!
The format of a typical programming contest is that teams of 1-3 students work together to solve a set of 4-6 programming problems over the course of 4 hours.
You don't need to have take a lot of CS classes to be able to do well. In fact, if you've taken an intro class and are comfortable manipulating data in arrays or strings, then you probably have enough background. Programs must be written in C, C++, or Java (Sorry, no Python yet).
To give you an idea of what to expect at a programming contest, here are two example problems given at past contests:
1. Given a dictionary of words and a sentence, you need to find all anagrams of that sentence which use only words found in the dictionary.
2. Given a set of points describing a target polygon and a list of other polygons, you need to determine which of the other polygons have the same shape as the target polygon, even though some may have been rotated or re-sized.
We are looking for people who might be interested in attending the ACM Mid-Atlantic Regional programming contest which is taking place on October 27 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. We can send multiple teams. The winner of this contest will go on to possibly compete in the world finals in Banff Springs Alberta.
If you are interested, please let us know by the end of the week (Sept 28).
Richard Wicentowski & Andrew Danner
More information on this contest can be found at http://www.radford.edu/~acm/midatl/index.html.