Undergraduate students from Lamar University’s Department of Computer Science placed in the Top 20 at the IBM-sponsored Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest’s South Central USA Regional competition at Louisiana State University Oct. 17 and 18.
Birds of Prey, one of two teams representing Lamar at the competition, placed 19th overall out of 68 teams from Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. They competed against 25 other undergraduate teams and 42 graduate teams, including one from Lamar. The team – made up of James Carnley of Beaumont, Ric Guidry of Port Neches and Jacob Wallace of Groves – was one of only five undergraduate teams to place in the Top 20.
“I was pretty excited that we finished in the top third,” said Wallace. “We competed really well against many universities much larger than Lamar.”
“They outperformed some teams from other universities, such as the University of Texas at Dallas, Texas A&M, University of Texas at Austin, Baylor University, Louisiana State University and Rice University,” said Stefan Andrei, assistant professor of computer science.
Andrei called the results “very good” and said the teams had practiced only five times before the competition because interruptions due to Hurricanes Gustav and Ike prevented the teams from practicing more.
Wallace believes they were well prepared for the contest because many of the contest problems tested areas similar to those they had worked during the practice sessions.
At the competition, the teams, undergraduate and graduate alike, were given one computer to work on and nine challenging problems to solve within five hours. “During the first few minutes, we each scanned the problems and picked one to work on,” Wallace said. “One team member would implement a program on the computer while the other two worked out other problems on paper. After programming a solution to the problem, we would then submit electronically for judging.”
If the solution was correct, the team received permission to move on to another problem, Andrei said. If the solution was incorrect, however, they had to evaluate what went wrong and then resubmit the revised solution.
Teams were judged based on the number of problems they solved correctly. If more than one team solved the same number of problems, they were ranked according to the amount of time it took them to solve the problem, Andrei said. Birds of Prey solved two problems within the time allotted.
