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.
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In reply to ACM Programming Competition by japhy

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