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Ferrum
College will be sending two teams to the ACM International Collegiate
Programming Contest to be held in Radford, VA, on Saturday, November
13th, 2004. The competition pits over 400 students in 161 teams from
73 schools in a contest of computer-based, deductive skills. Regionally
based teams include Virginia Tech, University of North Carolina and
the host team, Radford University.
The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest
is an activity of the Association for Computing Machinery that provides
college students with an opportunity to demonstrate and sharpen their
problem-solving and computing skills.
In preparation for the contest, the College offered a special topics
course, CSC290. The class meets one evening a week for an hour to discuss
various programming problems and then every Sunday afternoon for two
hours for competitive practice.
The two teams from Ferrum are titled the "FACTs"
and the "Factoids." The name of the Ferrum computer club is
FACT (Ferrum Association for Computer Technology). The teams are selected
by taking the three students with the best three class scores for the
FACTs, and the next three for the Factoids. Two students are exceptionally
talented at seeing into the guts of these problems and rapidly creating
a solution program are Taran Rorem ’07 and Michael Barr ’05. Rorem is
also the team captain and club president. Other team members include:
Byron Altice ‘06, Eugene Hacker ‘05, Alexander Janow ‘07 and Erik Richards
‘06.
The contest is a two-tiered competition among teams
of students representing institutions of higher education. Teams first
compete in the Regional Contests, held around the world from September
to November each year. The winning team from each Regional Contest advances
to the Contest Finals typically held in mid-March to early April. Regional
contests duplicate the atmosphere of the international contest.
The Mid-Atlantic Regional Contest lasts for five
hours. Each team of three students tries to solve as many problems as
possible, programming the solutions in C++ or Java. The team that solves
the most problems correctly wins, with ties broken by the least total
time (the sum of the times consumed for each problem solved, from the
beginning of the contest to the time the correct solution is submitted).
A penalty of 20 minutes for each incorrect submission is added to the
total time. The penalty only applies if the problem was eventually solved
correctly.
For more information on the The ACM International Collegiate Programming
Contest and sample problems, see the following website: http://midatl.cs.vt.edu/.
For more information Ferrum’s competing teams, please contact Dr. Frank
Ackerman at (540) 365-2625 or by email at fackerman@ferrum.edu.
Ferrum College is a four-year,
private, co-educational, liberal arts college affiliated with the United
Methodist Church. Ferrum offers a choice of nationally recognized bachelor’s
degree programs at a cost well below the national average for private
colleges. For more information on Ferrum, visit www.ferrum.edu. |
