If you've never heard of the ACM, it's the Association for Computing Machinery. If you've never heard of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, read about it here.

I'd heard of the ACM (I meant to join this year, but scheduling conflicts don't allow for it). I hadn't heard of the ACM ICPC until a friend of mine at RPI asked me if I was interested in competing. I said sure. I was hoping I could use Perl. Nuh-uh. C, C++, or Java. Guess which one I sided with. ;)

So on Saturday, I got up at 6:00 am, and went to Western New England College for the Regional Semifinal. There were 18 teams. My school sent three teams -- however, two of the teams were down one person (three people per team normally). So my partner and I were at a disadvantage, maybe. We had five hours to tackle seven problems, using only one machine. And it was MS Visual C++. (I wrote C, though. C++ is unnecessary for these tasks.)

We came in fourth. We got four of the seven done. Only the top three teams go on. :( But wait! There is a rule that a school can only have one team advance to the finals, and MIT had one team place at Western New England College, and one team place at Boston! So that means they have to let one team drop out, and the two fourth place teams get to advance!

I'm very thrilled. Not until now was I confident of my ability to program well in C. Now I know I'm not entirely spoiled by Perl. Hell, I was using linked lists!

So that's my story. I'm excited. November 3rd is the (update) Regional Final. Time to brush up on some more essential algorithms!

_____________________________________________________
Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: ACM Programming Competition
by Sherlock (Deacon) on Oct 17, 2001 at 17:07 UTC
    ...I meant to join this year, but scheduling conflicts don't allow for it...

    I'm assuming you're talking about your local chapter at school - for the most part, being a member of ACM doesn't require any time. If you go to http://www.acm.org, you'll find the organzation's homepage. If you're looking for membership information, check here - you'll find a link for a student membership, if that's what you're interested in. Professional membership is pretty steep, but as long as you're a student, the membership fee is actually quite minimal.

    With your membership, you're not required to attend any meetings, but you'll be a card-carrying member of ACM. With that, you'll automatically get the ACM publication Communications and also the student publication Crossroads (along with a handful of other perks). Both are pretty good. If you want more information, check out their site.

    - Sherlock

    Skepticism is the source of knowledge as much as knowledge is the source of skepticism.
[reply]

      You also get access the the ACM Digital Library, which has most of the papers from past Communications, Transactions, Proceedings etc in digital form (PDFs). Sadly they're often apparently scanned from paper so the files are large and the text isn't searchable, but it's still a tremendous resource.

      A great many of the fundamental algorithms from the 1970s were published in one of the ACMs publications, and it can be a goldmine. There's a lot of good stuff there which still isn't well-known outside the academic world.

      Ideally, of course, they'd make it available to everybody (not just ACM members). I hope they do.

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Re: ACM Programming Competition
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Oct 17, 2001 at 17:04 UTC
    I participated in that for 5 years and loved it! My last year, we only had 4 participants (school of 800 students) and so I was on a team by myself. *grins* I solved 5 and had solutions for the other 2. If I hadn't made a stupid error, I would've had 7. *sighs* Ah, well. :-)

    ------
    We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

    Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

[reply]
Re: ACM Programming Competition
by larsen (Parson) on Oct 17, 2001 at 23:36 UTC
    Congratulations, japhy! :) I've partecipated three times to regional contests and I can assure to other monks 4/7 is a great result :)

    Good luck for the finals :))

    Update: Fixed typo: "can't" "can". Thank you blakem

    Update: A possible good variation on programming-language advocacy could be propose some ICPC problem, solve it using a subset of CPAN (modules in standard distribution of Perl could be good) and compare it to a Pascal, C or C++ version. Or, maybe, organize (during a PM BOF?) a contest inspired to ACM ICPC but where you have to use Perl.

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Re: ACM Programming Competition
by Kit (Monk) on Oct 18, 2001 at 00:13 UTC
    Congratulations japhy and good luck in the finals.
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Re: ACM Programming Competition
by cmilfo (Hermit) on Oct 18, 2001 at 05:42 UTC
    This will be my first year in the contest. I've thought about competing in recent years but have not had time until now. Are you sure November 3rd is the National Final? Our Regional is November 3rd.
[reply]
      Corrected. Thank you!

      _____________________________________________________
      Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
      s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

[reply]
Re: ACM Programming Competition
by Indomitus (Scribe) on Oct 18, 2001 at 00:49 UTC
    Congrats japhy! I know that getting 4 out of 7 is pretty darn good. I think only one of our teams got that many when my school went to our regional a couple of years ago. I also know that I probably could have done well by myself had I been able to use my (at the time rudimentary) knowledge of Perl. Oh well, maybe someday they'll let us use the One True Language. :)
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