Archive for October, 2013

Zach Felix dominates field in Messiah Prelim Contest

Tuesday, October 8th, 2013

Seven students gave up their Saturday afternoon and evening to do competitive programming in the Messiah College Prelim Contest, October 5. Zach Felix, competing remotely from the Philly campus, was the big winner, but all participants were successful in solving at least two problems. At the end of the five-hour contest, the standings were:

Zach Felix Solved 9 of 11 91%
Dan Baker and Nathan Chaney Solved 3 in 320 minutes 55%
Chris Beam and Taran King Solved 3 in 507 minutes 55%
Matthew Bohn and Andrew Cameron Solved 2 39%

(The right-most column indicates the teams performance compared to the 597 teams that competed on the same problem-set at the same time at other schools.)

At the start of the contest the students were given a packet of 11 problems, and tasked with solving as many problems as possible. Each solution consisted of a computer program that would read an input file and generate a certain output. Solutions were submitted to an automated judging system (hosted by Baylor University) which performs test runs of the solution and returns a “correct” or “incorrect” result to the student team.

This contest was only for certificates of recognition and bags of candy, but it also serves as a practice run (and a qualifier) for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Regionals to be held on November 2, to which Messiah College will be sending six students.

Nathan Chaney and Dan Baker hold their winners certificate.

Andrew and Matthew hard at work on the second problem.