Archive for November, 2014

Updated contest results put Falcons 1st overall!

Wednesday, November 12th, 2014

The regional judges of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Programming Contest have posted a new “final” scoreboard for the contest, and the new scoreboard puts Messiah College Falcons-1 team in FIRST PLACE overall! Congratulations to Zach, Nathan, and Marcus on this fantastic update!

As mentioned in the last post, this contest was a large multiple-states contest with 60 schools represented. And Messiah College’s team did very well, but there was some question as to the final result because the judging system broke down with 19 minutes remaining in the contest. The judges promised they would try to recover the submissions made during those final minutes, but we had little hope of those final submissions changing the overall result. Well, here’s what the head judge communicated to us this morning:

“Over the subsequent days, our Regional Systems Administrator, Andrew Ray, worked closely with the PC^2 development team to recover the un-judged submissions from the various snapshots and redundancies in the PC^2 databases. We were ultimately able to [recover] 115 such submissions. We believe that these represent all of the submissions for which teams received a run confirmation receipt after clicking the submit button. It is possible that some teams attempted to submit after I ended the contest, or during periods when the server was down, but these would not have received a confirmation receipt. I have judged all of the recovered runs.   Those that were correct are reflected in the results shown above.”

With our team’s placement in 1st place, we are almost guaranteed an invite to the world finals, held this upcoming May in Morocco. This is a great opportunity for the three students on this team, and for Messiah College to be represented among these elite schools.

Falcons 1 wins ICPC site regional at Shippensburg

Monday, November 3rd, 2014

On Saturday, November 1, 2014, nine students traveled to Shippensburg University to take part in the 2014 ACM Mid-Atlantic Regional Programming Contest. There were 24 teams from 9 different schools. Messiah’s first team, Falcons 1 (Nathan Chaney, Zachary Felix, and Marcus Upton) solved three of the eight problems, taking first place. The problem set was very difficult, with only seven teams solving any problems at all. Falcons 2 (Dan Baker, Taran King, and Yacoub Seyni) and Falcons 3 (Andrew Cameron, Steven Nicolais, and Kelly Schwiker) were among the 17 teams unable to solve any of the problems.

Falcons 1- Marcus Upton, Zachary Felix, Nathan Chaney

Among Messiah’s opponents were Dickinson College, Lebanon Valley College, Millersville University, Penn State Harrisburg, Shippensburg University and Swarthmore College. Special thanks to the Shippensburg University faculty and staff that helped run the contest at their site.

Falcons 3- Steven Nicolais, Kelly Schwiker, Andrew Cameron

Falcons 2- Dan Baker, Taran King, Yacoub Seyni

The contest was part of a larger, multi-state contest hosted by Radford University, with 188 teams from 60 schools competing. Among the large contest, our Falcons 1 team scored FOURTH place, which is really an incredible result, beating out some strong schools such as University of North Caroina, Duke, and Georgetown University. Our result may have been even better, but unfortunately submissions made in the last 19 minutes of the contest could not be judged due to technical problems at the remote judging site. Falcons 1 made multiple submissions during that time; if any of them had proved correct then Falcons 1 may have placed higher. Unfortunately, Radford University reports very low expectations of being able to fairly reconstruct the results.