On Saturday the 26th of March 2011 myself, Carl and Keith Cully, one of our class mates attended the ACM programming contest at University College Cork. We left Carlow around 7.00 or so and took the long trip down to Cork. Luckily this year we knew where we were going after getting lost last year and walking around UCC like lost children. We arrived early as did our lecturer, Joseph Keogh. We all sat outside in the sun and Joe imparted some magical knowledge of how he looks smart every day (“Buy the Financial Times and carry it under your arm.”)

The Contest

The contest lasted for four hours with 8 problems to solve. This year the setup was much better and I have to hand it to the UCC ACM chapter the system they themselves implemented for marking and uploading solutions to the problems was brilliant, it was all automated and it instantly told you that your solution didn’t compile or work for the sample cases. Massive improvement this year over last year. The contest also had a larger turn out this year with 16 teams from different third level institutes around Ireland coming to compete.

The Problems

Our team solved four of the problems using C++ as our language in four hours and we were happy enough with that as we hadn’t done much practice for the contest due to mounting college projects, exams and other external projects to college. For people who are interested in the problems we will be posting a question every few weeks for people to try out. The problems really help to develop your logic and algorithm development skills so I would highly recommend them to any programmer, it’s great exercise for your brain.

Pictures

Coming soon..