Adelaide
| Auckland
|
Brisbane | Canberra | Dunedin | Launceston
| Melbourne | Perth | Sydney
The 2003 ACM South Pacific Programming Contest sponsored
by IBM was held on Saturday 20th September at 9 sites across
Australia and New Zealand. 96 teams competed for the chance
to represent their country in the World Finals in Prague
next year.
The results are
now final.
Thanks to ACM for organising the contest, and to
IBM for their support, including prizes for the top teams
at each
site.
Site Reports
Adelaide from
Paul Calder
The competition at the Adelaide site continues to grow.
This year we
fielded 13 teams: 6 from Flinders, 4 from UniSA, and 3 from
Adelaide. It was pleasing to see 4 quite competitive second-year-only
teams this
year, which bodes well for next year's comp.
The contest started right on time and ran without a hitch,
thanks to the
thorough preparation of Site Technician Trent Lewis. And
thanks to the
prompt and careful work of Site Judges Brad Alexander and
Takeshi
Matsumoto, with help from balloon runners and helpers-at-large
Stewart
Itzstein and Darius Pfitzner, the judging also proceeded
smoothly.
The contest got off to a flying start, with 4 teams submitting
correct
solutions to problem 1 inside the first 10 minutes (and one
also getting
problem 2 out after only 20 minutes). In fact, the judges
(and balloon
runners) were kept quite busy for the first hours, with 30
correct
solutions accepted by that time. Teams found problems 1,
2 and 3 the
easiest, with all teams solving problem 1 inside the first
hour, and most
getting problem 2 inside the first 90 minutes and problem
3 by the 2-hour
mark. By the end, all teams had at least 2 problems out.
The pace dropped off considerably after about the mid-way
point, with teams
tackling the more difficult problems. But the arrival of
the pizzas
provided some welcome relief and the teams went back to it
with a
vengeance. For a while we had 6 teams on 4 problems; clearly
it was a race
to see who could get the 5th solution. "Sigsegv" from
Flinders was the
first, submitting their 5th correct solution at the 208 minute
mark and
heading the scoreboard until "UniSA team 2" equaled
them at the 234 minute
mark. But it was the late charge from last-year's defending
champions "
Adelaide team 1", solving problem 9 at the 289 minute
mark, that
leap-frogged them into the winning position. And despite
the usual
last-minute flurry of attempts, no body was able to dislodge
them.
So despite the best efforts of the well-prepared and well-turned-out
UniSA
contingent (thanks again to coach Stewart Itzstein), and
a concerted push
from the local Flinders teams (thanks to ex-contestant now
turned coach
Takeshi Matsumoto), the University of Adelaide (coached by
Brad Alexander)
again took away the Golden Ukulele. But going by the determined
look on
the faces of several of the second-year contestants, they're
going to be
hard put to hold on to it next year!
Overall, most people reported that they enjoyed the day,
found the contest
worthwhile and stimulating, and would be interested in competing
again in
future.
Auckland
from Phil Robbins
We had 16 teams competing at the Auckland University of
Technology this year, teams coming from Hamilton and Wellington
as well as Auckland.
Technical problems meant we started an hour
late, but once these were overcome the contest ran smoothly.
Every team
managed to solve at least 3 problem which was great. Our
champion team was "A Handshaking Llama" from University
of Waikato who solved 5 problems. Special mention must also
be made of our second placed team, "Null" from
University of Auckland, made up of year 1 students. They
solved problem
9 and only had to solve problem 4 to become New Zealand Champions!
Thanks to Professor Felix Tan who opened proceedings, to
Radu Nicolescu, Michael Dinneen and Bill Rogers who acted
as judges, to Peter Kay, Gordon Grimsey and Kyongho Min who
helped on the contest floor, to Art Brown, Brian Green, Libby
Perrett, Aakriti Sharma and Sunita Taneja who managed the
technical side of the event, and to Boris Bacic who took
the team photographs. Thanks to IBM for their sponsorship,
and to ACM for organising the event, and to our special guest
ACM lecturer, professor Don Gotterbarn, who presented the
prizes.
Brisbane
(no report available)
Canberra
from Eric McCreath
This year the Canberra site had four teams competing from
the ANU.
It would be great to get some teams from The University of
Canberra and
ADFA in next years competition (assuming they are up to the
challenge!).
Team Atra (from ANU) did well getting off to a flying start,
however,
their lead was eventually
clawed back by Silver (from ANU) and Orange (from ANU).
All the teams solved the first three problems in under 1
hour and 20 minutes.
However, from this point on the task before the teams became
considerably more
difficult. Interestingly there was only a small number of
incorrect solutions
submitted. On the problems that the teams successfully
completed they only submitted their solutions once. So the
only
incorrect solutions submitted were on problem teams never
successfully completed. This was a nice demonstration of
Software Engineering,
as teams were able get their programs right the first time.
It also made
judging easier!
Silver (from ANU) winning in the Canberra area with a
total of 6 of the 9 problems out.
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 sorting out the end of line
problems
associated with running the server on an NT machine and the
judges
and teams on Linux boxes. This year Stewart Fleming could
not act as
Technical Director as he was involved with a sister's wedding
in
Edinburgh and a duathlon in Switzerland (in the middle of
the
European heat wave), so Nick Meek occupied the hot seat.
We
eliminated the problems with the "Run" button in
PC^2 by informing
the teams that it did not/would not work and leaving them
to test
their programs from the command line. (Oh that we could have
done the
same, we had to anyway most of the time.)
The next hiccup came when a sharp-eyed team realised that
there was a
problem with the sample input and output data for Problem
6. I fixed
the output data file, but was not aware that the input file
needed
fixing also, as I thought that the input was coming in unsorted.
This
caused many problems for the top two teams in particular,
one of whom
lost nearly an hour on this.
Congratulations to all teams who entered. Thanks to a good
range of
questions, all teams got at least 3 problems out. Special
congratulations to The Pumpkin Lemma (Bartosz Fabianowski,
Birger
Brunswiek and Phil Mcleod) as worthy site winners and NZ
Champions.
It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if
we had had
fewer problems -- they were under half an hour from solving
two more
problems. Congratulations also to Indra's Pearls from Canterbury
who
were doughty contestants. It was a close run thing in the
end.
Thanks to Nick Meek for setting up PC^2 and nursing it through
its
hissy fits and also supervising the revision of the data
files to
conform to Linux expectations; to Cathy Chandra our Linux
sysadmin
who kept everything going and checked for inappropriate network
behaviour by the teams; to Ken Sutton, Andrew Trotman and
Ramakrishnan Mukundan for coaching; and finally to Allan
Hayes and
Malcolm Mills for setting up the site in The Link (outside
the
University Library) and then taking it all down again at
the end of
the day.
All the best to the team in Prague next year. It should
be a good
contest with the UNSW team.
Launceston
from Mike Cameron-Jones
In many respects this year's event in Launceston was very
similar to
the last few - starting at about the right time, continuing
without major
incident, and ending with the site being clearly won by the
team containing
the entrant with the most previous site championships (Michael
Horton).
Congratulations are thus due to "Wirthless" (Adam
Hill, Daniel Hedlund and
Michael) on their impressive performance, which will probably
see them do well
in the regional placings when the results are finalised.
With every team at the site solving at least 3 problems,
praise
is due to all entrants for their creditable performance.
However, "Elephant
Fresh" (Charles O'Farrell, Dmitry Kamenetsky and Rowan
Martin-Hughes) deserve
special mention, for being closely behind "Wirthless" in
the early stages
and ultimately finishing second on site, which is particularly
noteworthy as they were the only team
all of whose members were first time participants in
the event.
Thanks are due to the head judge for yet another
well prepared
problem set, to the ACM and IBM for organisation and sponsorship,
and to those who helped out on the site on the day and before
as well:
Tony Gray (Technical Director), Robyn Gibson (Judge), Andrew
Spilling
(Technician, Pizza Fetcher, etc.) and Christian McGee (Technician).
Thanks also to Raelene Couch (for help
before the event) and Ian Lewis (for coaching two of the entered teams).
Melbourne from George Fernandez
The Melbourne site of the competition ran with no problems.
There were no technical glitches, the environment worked
well, the judging was done without difficulties, and the
responses reached the teams very quickly. There was only
a small problem at the beginning with the compilation and
running of Java files, due to a configuration mistake, so
teams were instructed to work on the command line for a llittle
while. After some quick exploration, Fabian discovered and
solved the misconfiguration, and PC^2 worked fine after that.
When the error on the data file for the Phones problem was
discovered, we told the team with that problem pending that
we believed that their answer was OK, and to proceed with
the others. We did so because we modified the data file to
remove the wrong section, and their answer checked out OK
when running 'diff' on the command line.
Our congratulations to all the participating teams, especially
to the Melbourne site winners, Melbourne University A (Lars
Yencken, Grant Byers and Peter Hawkins, 6 problems, 479 minutes),
and to the worthy second place getters Melbourne University
B (In-Ho Ye, Jesse Neave, Kieran Rowe, 5 problems, 447 minutes).
Also, it was very good to see teams from La Trobe University
Bendigo doing so well in third place (Corin Lawson, Levi
Cameron, Jamie Aisbett, 4 problems, 423 minutes) and Victoria
University in fourth (Alfie John, Thanh Lam, and Vasantha
Crabb, 4 problems, 448 minutes). Congratulations to their
coaches as well, John Dethridge, Paul Goddard and Khalil
Shihab.
We had many people helping out with judging, coordinating
and just doing general chores. Our special thanks to John
Dethridge, Paul Goddard, Michael Ciavarella, Pablo Rossi
for the judging, and to Kim Patton and Samantha DiBenedetto
for their administrative support before and during the
competition.
Looking forward to the next one!
Fabian Iannarella (Technical Coordinator)
Mirka Borowska (Melbourne Site Director)
George Fernandez (Australian Contest Director)
Perth from
Royce Jenkins and Peter Cole
The Perth contest was held in a different venue than normal
this year, due to the larger number of teams this year. We
had 17 teams, which is a record number for Perth (this is
with one university not fielding teams).
The contest started an hour late due to small problems.
After this though, everything ran smoothly. With food and
drinks available, kindly set up by Jacqueline Allen, teams
were able to settle into solving problems, in a spacious
area, with nice views.
This year we were honoured to have Raewyn Boerson attend
our site and we would like to extend our thanks to Raewyn
for all her assistance. We would also like to thank our Judges;
Dr. Luigi Barone (UWA), Dr. Brian Von Konsky (Curtin University)
and Dr. Nicola Ritter (Murdoch University). We would also
like to thank Megan Cole for helping during the competition.
The local winners successfully defended last year’s
title to win locally back-to-back. They consisted of two
thirds of the original team. They were Coders of The Lookup
Table from UWA (Bernard Blackham, Jim Mussared and Mark Rankilor,
4 problems in 350 minutes), followed by A Curtin Miracle
from Curtin (Edwin Wong, Jeremy Wong and Kent Yip, 4 problems
in 458 minutes) and No Idea, also from UWA (Lixin Chin, Rohan
Joyce and Thomas Castiglione, 4 problems in 584 minutes).
Coders of The Lookup Table finished equal 20th position nationally.
All teams managed to complete one problem, which is a better
result than last year. The top Murdoch team was Tech Corp
with 3 problems in 287 minutes.
The only exclusively first year team was NDB (Freshies)
from Murdoch University.
SiteTechnical Director: Royce Jenkins
Site Director: Peter Cole
Sydney from
Hossam El Gindy
It is a great relief for me to write, on the morning after,
that everything went well in the Sydney site during the
2003 South Pacific Regional Contest.
The contest started 10 minutes later than the noon scheduled
time to allow for everyone to settle down and get access
to
their accounts. We had 4 teams from Macquarie University
and 11 teams from University of New South Wales. University
of Sydney teams' traditional presence was sadly missed but
I
am sure they will be back, along with other NSW universities,
for the 2004 South Pacific Programming contest.
Radu's selection of problems got the teams excited and going
early with over 30 submissions in the first hours. The arrival
of the first Pizza delivery at 1:30 p.m. generated another
barrage of submissions which kept the three judges (Alexandre
Mah, Keith So and Sharon Tam ) busy for
the first two hours.
The computer system and PC^2 went about doing their job well
due to the superb planning and testing by Simon
Bowden (the site technical director),
who spent most of the contest time enjoying the fruits of
his earlier work not to mention
the
fruits (real ones, that is). The pace slowed down.
The second Pizza delivery at 3:30 managed to generate more
submissions. Unfortunately only 9 submissions were judged
as correct in
the last
2 hours of the contest. During the 5 hours of the contest,
members
of the ACM student chapter (Chairy Chiu
Ying Cheung, Seng Lin Shee,
Navjot Garcha, Venkatesh Kanchan, Irene Lo, Umar, June Yin,
Chien-Chin Yong ) maintained the supply of
print-outs,
food and drinks available. Many thanks for running a smooth
and calm
competition environment.
After 5 hours, we had 64 correct answers from a total of
132 submissions.
The minimum number of solved problems by a single team was
3 problems
and the maximum number was 8. The top five teams (as judged
locally)
received prizes supplied by the competition sponsor (IBM).
