John Greiner distills into numbers the challenge posed to Rice University students at the 2017 South Central USA Regional Contest: “11 problems, five hours, three people and one computer per team.”
On Nov. 4, five teams from Rice competed in a field of 73 teams in the competition held annually by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) International Collegiate Programming Contest. Taking first place was UT Orange, from the University of Texas at Austin.
“Usually we have a team in the top five, but our top team this year was 12th. It’s a little disappointing, but on the other hand, four of our five teams were in the top 25, which is much more consistent than usual. We had younger teams this year, with few seniors, so I’m hoping many of them will participate again next year,” said Greiner, the Rice lecturer in computer science (CS) who has coached the teams since 2003.
All participants were CS undergraduates except for one CS master’s student, Hunter Tidwell, and an exchange student, Pedro Oliveira. Here are how the Rice teams finished, team members and the number of problems successfully solved:
Rice Lalalalalalalalalala team
12th place: Rice Lalalalalalalalalala; Madison Lewis, Anh Tran, Avery Whitaker; six problems
Rice While team
13th place: Rice while (team); Zirun Lin, Tianyi Liu, Pedro Oliveira; six problems
Rice Cowculating team
18st place: Rice Cowculating; Patrick Brady, Simran Virk, Thomas Yuan; six problems
Rice Fondren Forall team
24st place: Rice Fondren ForAll; Namgun Kim, Jung Hee Ryu, Hunter Tidwell; five problems
Rice Irregular Expression team
45th place: Rice Irregular Expression; Wei Dai, Edward Feng, Xinhao Lin; three problems
The South Central region includes teams from universities in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. Rice competed at Baylor University against teams from Baylor, LeTourneau University, North American University, Southwestern University, Texas A&M University, University of Texas at Austin, Trinity University, University of Dallas, University of Houston and UH at Clear Lake.
Patrick Kurp, Engineering Communications