Three University students will travel to San Antonio, Tex., in April to participate in an international computer programming competition with 79 other teams from across the world.
Paul Nelson '06, Amirali Modir Shanechi '08 and David Costanzo '08 advanced to the international competition after placing second out of 59 teams in the regional competition of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in Union, N.J., on Nov. 20. Since only the first-place team in each region automatically qualifies for the international competition, the team members had to wait and hope for a wildcard invitation.
At the regional level, Nelson said, team members were expected to know the basics of programming, including "how to program in C, C++ or Java, basic algorithms, basic math. Most of the challenge is in quickly writing bug-free code since the problems themselves, at least at the regional level, aren't particularly difficult, but it's easy to make small errors."
Nelson predicted that the world competition, which he said requires a more advanced knowledge of programming, will be "probably less forgiving on amateurs like us."
"At some schools, they train for this contest and have courses devoted to it," he said.
Dan Halpern-Leistner '07 and William Mansky '08 founded the Princeton ACM teams this year after learning about the competition from a mutual friend at Harvard.
"I asked around, and I found that there was actually a lot of interest in the competition, but no one had bothered to get things organized," Halpern-Leistner said.
"We felt that Princeton should also have a team, both for the sake of competition and because we enjoy programming," Mansky added.
"We started slowly initially, since neither of us had much experience in organizing things, but [Halpern-Leistner] found a grad student, Miro Dudik, who agreed to coach the team and help with organizing practice sessions and events."
Four other Princeton teams also competed in the regional competition, which was held at Kean University in Union. All of Princeton's teams placed in the top 20 and four of them placed in the top 10, a result Halpern-Leistner described as "surprising."
"I didn't expect that we would do so well our first time around," he said.
Though the students spent some time preparing for the regional competition, Halpern-Leistner said it never felt like homework.
"The people on the team, we are programmers — it is what we do," he said. "The competition is just an opportunity for us to have some fun with it."
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