2008 Regional Contest

Message from our Regional Contest Director

Hi Everyone

Congratulations to the teams and their coaches from the University of Melbourne and the University of Canterbury who will be representing the ACM South Pacific Region in Stockholm next year. It was a splendid effort and mention must also be made of the University of Tasmania. These 3 teams set themselves apart by solving 8 of the 9 problems.

While the University of Melbourne has qualified for the World Finals previously (and indeed they won it in 1992 - no pressure on this year's team!!!!), this will be the first time that Canterbury has represented the Region.

We have increased the number of sites in the Region, going from 9 to 11 and the Sydney site was filled to overflowing. We were the first Region to use the new registration system and we identified a few small issues so I thank you all for your patience. Only when you are the first users of a system do you REALLY, REALLY appreciate good programming and great testing.

While we created some unintentional(!) suspense with one of the problems, the problem set was interesting and well balanced and this can be seen by the following statistics:

* 82 teams solving 2 or more problems
* 61 teams solving at least 3 problems.

This is just a fantastic result and one that we have been trying to achieve for some time. Thanks to the Judging team for their efforts.

Special mention must be made of IBM. They have been very generous in their support of us. It makes our job so much easier knowing that the cost of the prizes and refreshments have been covered.

Thanks also to all the volunteers at each of the sites - the site co-ordinators, the technicians, the admin staff, the coaches who acted as judges on the day and all the other volunteers whose contribution allowed our teams to have this opportunity.

In New Zealand, we ran a parallel contest for 4 high school teams and this pilot proved that we have some younger students who are very capable already and who can only get better. While they had 3 specially designed problems to solve, they also had the ACM set and managed to solved some of these as well.

Finally, thanks to all the teams and their coaches. With the high performance levels it is obvious that there is some great coaching going on. Thankyou all for providing such a competitive contest.

Raewyn Boersen
ACM South Pacific Regional Director

See our results page for the top 10.

Posted 14th September

The 2008 Regional Contest is over. Provisional results are available on the Results page.

Posted 9th September

Countdown to the contest. Registration closes tomorrow.

Posted 15th August

To register for the 2008 contest, you must use the ACM ICPC Registration System. This has changed since last year. You may like to follow this guide.

Posted 8th August

Registration for the 2008 contest is now open. The contest is on Saturday September 13th.

2007 Regional Contest

Posted 26th September

Congratulations to the University of Auckland and Griffith University on their success at our Regional Contest.  These two teams will be representing us in Canada in April 2008.  The team UA: Thursday, Heather Macbeth, Matthew Gatland and Matthew Steel and their coach Michael Dinneen advance to the Finals as first place getters and New Zealand representatives, solving 6 problems in 1164 minutes. In second place, Michael McMullen, Katie McLaughlin and Nicholas Dahm competing as 'The Toclafane', solved 5 problems in 581 minutes. Their coach was Andrew Rock.  They also advance to the Finals, representing Australia. In position 3 and 4 are teams from the University of Western Australia and Australian National University respectfully. 'Where's Cameron' from Perth were only 9 minutes behind the Griffith team (5 problems in 590 minutes) and ANU Grey solved 5 problems in 667 minutes.

A big thank you to all the contest support staff who made it possible for all of our teams to have this opportunity - site directors, technicians, judges and those of you who took other roles needed on the day.  Many volunteers worked behind the scenes to bring this event to fruition.   Hossam Elgindy led the judging team and  we would like to thank them all for providing a challenging set of problems for the teams to solve.  (Next year we will attempt to have more problems at the lower end of the difficulty scale).  We had four new site directors - Ian Welch in Wellington, Richard Lobb in Christchurch, Bernie Pope in Melbourne and Judy Kay in Sydney.  Thank you for supporting your students in this way.

Feedback re the medals has been positive and these, the t-shirts and the pens were only possible due to the generous support of our sponsor IBM . 

Coaches, thank you for encouraging your students to participate.   We have a record number of teams (25) at our Adelaide site and our three enthusiastic Site directors there who rotate the contest around their universities show what can be done when we work together and share the load.  Perhaps other sites might like to follow their lead. 

And of course, to all the contestants , thank you for participating. We hope you had fun, that you learned a little and that you were challenged enough by the problem set that you will want to come and compete again next year.  

Visit the results page for a listing of the top 10 in the Region.

Cheers

Raewyn Boersen

ACM South Pacific Regional Director

Posted 15th September

Contest day has arrived. Hopefully you will be able to follow the contest from this Web site!

Posted August 25th

Registration has been open for a few weeks, and registrations are trickling in slowly! The contest is on Saturday September 15th.

Current team list.

2007 World Finals

Posted March 17th

Our teams are just back from the finals in Tokyo where each achieved better than "Honorable Mention". Congratulations to all, and especially to the team from University of Auckland who came 11th out of 88.

Posted January 21st

You will be pleased to know that we have a THIRD team advancing to the Finals in Tokyo.

We have a wildcard and the UNSW team and Hossam are the lucky recipients. Here is what ACM had to say:
"The University of New South Wales is a wild card and their advancing to the Finals is due to the model we are using that allows a small number of wildcards to be used for high performance teams that have solved the same number of problems as the top team in their region. Very exciting!"

Raewyn Boersen

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