Adelaide
| Auckland
|
Brisbane | Canberra
| Dunedin
| Launceston
| Melbourne | Perth | Sydney
The 2002 ACM South Pacific Programming Contest sponsored
by IBM was held on Saturday 21st September at 9 sites across
Australia and New Zealand. 101 teams competed for the chance
to represent their country in the World Finals next year.
The results are now final. There were serious technical
problems at Sydney which meant their results were delayed.
Thank you all for your patience.
Site Reports
Adelaide
from Paul Calder
This year we had our largest competition ever, with 12 teams
competing at the Adelaide site (up from 9 last year). Specifically,
we had 3 teams from the University of South Australia competing
for the first time (thanks to the efforts of the UniSA coach
Stewart Itzstein), as well as 3 from Adelaide University (thanks
again to coach Brad Alexander) and 6 from Flinders University.
The contest started right on time and ran without a hitch.
Thanks to the hard work (and early-morning start) of Site
Technician Trent Lewis, PC2 behaved beautifully. And thanks
to the prompt and careful work of judges Brad Alexander and
Stewart Itzstein, with help from Assistant Site Directory
Carl Mooney, the judging also proceeded smoothly.
Our first correct submission landed on the judges' desk 17
minutes into the contest, with other correct submissions hot
on its heals. In fact, the judges were kept rather busy for
the first hour, with 16 correct solutions accepted by that
time. Teams found problems 1 and 3 easiest, with most teams
earning their red and yellow balloons fairly early. Incidentally,
the balloons idea worked well; by the time the pizzas arrived
around the mid-way point, the contest rooms were looking quite
festive!
The pace dropped off considerably during the second half
of the contest as the teams tackled the more challenging problems.
After 2 hours we had 25 correct runs (including 5 from one
team!); in the last 3 hours, only 13 more correct submissions
came in (including 2 during the last minute!). By the end,
all teams had at least one correct submission, and our best
team had 6.
After their humiliation at the hands of the Flinders teams
last year, Adelaide was triumphant this year, taking out the
first 2 places and thus being the inaugural winner of the
Golden Ukulele, our newly instigated perpetual trophy. Flinders
took third place, and UniSA contributed the best second-year-only
team, so everyone had a share in the success.
Overall, most people reported that they enjoyed the day,
found the contest worthwhile and stimulating, and would be
interested in competing again in future. From the university's
point of view, we were very happy to be involved in the contest
and have every intention of hosting again next year.
Auckland
from Phil Robbins
We had 17 teams competing at the Auckland University of Technology
this year. The home university and our neighbours at the University
of Auckland competed, as did teams from the University of
Waikato, Victoria University in Wellington, and Massey University's
Institute of Information Sciences & Technology.
The proceedings were opened by Professor Steve MacDonell
of AUT. Registration was conducted by Peter Kaye and Firas
Al-Ali. Our site technician Art Brown worked hard to get the
machines ready in time (the lab we were using was open to
students until 7pm Friday!), while the judges Michael Dinneen,
Radu Nicolescu, Bill Rogers and Tony McGregor made their final
preparations. Boris Bacic took photographs of all the teams.
The first submission arrived after about 10 minutes, and
the judges were kept busy most of the afternoon. Gordon Grimsey
and Nurul Sarkar helped in the contest lab, and with the distribution
of pizzas afterwards.
Congratulations to the site winners, void
from the University of Auckland, who are also the New Zealand
champions for 2002. Every team managed to solve at least 2
problems, so well done to you all!
Thanks to everyone who helped, especially to Art for the
huge amount of work he put in on the day and into the early
hours of Sunday morning!
Brisbane
from Chris Ho-Stuart
Five hours to do what amounts to about a years practical
work; the ACM programming contest is certainly the right place
to look for keen programming students!
As always, it was a long, hard, exciting, adrenalin filled
day. Thirteen teams from four Universities took part, and
all the teams deserve full credit for their work and their
achievement.
The race began about fifteen minutes late, with the first
solutions coming on-line an incredible five minutes later.
As each new correct solution came on-line, it was acknowledged
with coloured markers on the successful terminals, and it
was not long before the two rooms were a small forest of markers.
About an hour into the contest, teams were working on harder
problems which stretched their ability and the frantic pace
slowed a bit, but there was always a steady stream of submissions,
and the PC2 judging software certainly streamlined the whole
submission and response system.
The early leader, "Class Act" from the University
of Queensland, dominated the field from the very start, and
went on to take out Brisbane honours with six problems solved.
"UQ E" also from the University of Queensland came
second, with four problems, and "The Simpletons",
of Bond University, placed third with three problems. Leading
teams from Griffith University and the Queensland University
of Technology also solved three problems each.
The success of the day owes much to judges and helpers, and
also the coaches of all four Universities for coming along
to help on the day. Grateful thanks go to Dominic Cooney,
Sartaj Singh (QUT), Rodney Topor (Griffith), Phil Stocks,
Andrew, (Bond), and Jamie Shields (UQ).
Industry support is also essential. The contest sponsors,
IBM, enable the whole contest to occur, also supplied prizes
and other giveaways. The entry fees for all teams at the Brisbane
site were paid by GBST, an Australian company developing software
for on-line financial and stock transactions.
Thanks to everyone involved, and just wait till next year!
Canberra
from Eric McCreath
This year the Canberra site had four teams competing from
the ANU.
All the teams solved the first three problems quickly. However,
from this point on the task before the teams became considerably
more difficult. Problem 4 cause difficulties as the programs
submitted, although produced the correct results, were an
order of magnitude too slow for the test data. ANU 42 managed
to get 4 problems out. Yet, once again "Implausable
Solutions" came out on top solving 5 problems.
Overall the contest ran very smoothly, with the pc2 software
not causing any problems. Many thanks to Bob Edwards for organizing
and setting up the computers and their environment(and for
getting the pizza!). Overall everyone concerned found this
a challenging and enjoyable day.
Dunedin
from Chris Handley
The contest went fine, after a few initial glitches with
PC^2 were sorted out. Stewart Fleming (Technical Director)
left after setting the contest up to run a half-marathon,
leaving the contest in the capable hands of Nick Meek. Stewart
returned briefly between the race and the prize giving to
clear up a few minor printing problems and then returned later
to help stop the contest and create the files to be sent to
the chief judge. In the mean time Ken Sutton from SIT and
Chris Handley judged and judged and judged.
Thanks to all the teams who participated, in particular to
those that travelled from Christchurch and Invercargill. Congratulations
to 'Just
THC' from Canterbury, worthy site winners and also to
'Think
Think Think' from SIT who came 23rd in the region, 10th
in New Zealand and 3rd in Dunedin.
Launceston
from Mike Cameron-Jones
This year's event went smoothly in Launceston, despite some
difficulties in the Friday practice session in which a weird
PC^2 artefact cropped up. Although we started a few minutes
late due to a briefing overrun, submissions were hitting the
judges earlier than usual from the site record number of teams.
In terms of site results, things went much according to
form. Although "The Adam + 2" (Adam Eijdenberg,
Patrick Cranney and late sub Christian De Kievit) were fastest
out of the blocks and ultimately finished second on the site,
it was no surprise when "Deja Fu" (Michael Horton,
Andrew Stevens and Jonathan Adamcziewski) sprinted past them
within a few minutes and ran away with the site championship,
also topping the region for most of the event. Meanwhile other
teams were quietly getting on with their own work, taking
an eternity to find a superfluous space, etc.
All teams are to be congratulated on their efforts, and
"Deja
Fu" in particular for their performance, with Michael
Horton "three-peating" as a Site Champion and repeating
a regional 4th.
Thanks are due to the head judge for a clarification request
free problem set, to the ACM and IBM for organisation and
sponsorship, and to those who helped out on the site on the
day (and in most cases before as well):
Tony Gray (Technical Director), Robyn Gibson (Judge), Andrew
Spilling (Technician, Pizza Orderer, etc.), Christian McGee
(Technician), Ian Lewis (Judge).
Sydney
from Josiah Poon
The room was packed with people when we started the briefing.
We had 19 teams competing in the Sydney site this year. We
had 10 teams from University of New South Wales (coached by
Hossam ElGindy), 5 teams from the Macquarie University (with
coach Mark Dras) and 4 teams from the University of Sydney
(the coach is Bob Kummerfeld). Sarah, who is the chair of
the ACM Student Chapter in the Sydney Uni, did most of the
organization. She had also invited students from the Informatics
Olympiad to partake in the competition informally. We had
2 of these students (and they are high school students) showing
up on Saturday.
We kicked off at around 12:10pm AEST and everything went
well initially until 3:15pm. At that time, we had 2 teams
finishing 5 questions and this particular high school team
was doing exceptionally well (I think they came third at that
time). But then disaster came. First, part of the database
was corrupted. Then, the server kept going down in every 5
minutes. Though we were able see the teams submitting their
code, the server was down and their submission was lost. Contestants
started to queue outside the judging room to clarify if their
submitted code has ever reached us and been validated. In
the mean time, our technical staff worked hard and tried everything
to keep the PC^2 alive, but with minimal success. The whole
atmosphere became very tense and stressful, to the students
as well as to the staff.
At then end, we finished the competition at 5pm because it
became almost impossible to do a decent job in such an environment.
We asked the students to keep their files in the appropriate
directories where we would grab them for analysis later on.
I was told that we had a team who has done 9 questions, 8
of them were validated and correct, the 9th one was still
to be judged.
Our technical staff worked around the clock to get the files
and pack them up for a proper investigation.
