Battle of the brains: Computer programmers throw down at Algoma U

Four teams of students from the School of Computer Science and Technology at Algoma University put their problem solving skills to the test during a programming competition held at the school Saturday. 

The event serves as a regional qualifier for the International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC), which sees schools from around the world take part each year. Site coordinator Anthony Pagnotta says the four teams competing Saturday are provided with a set of problems to solve over the course of the one-day event. 

“They’ll have some complicated wording and tricks — you kind of have to read through what the actual problem is to figure out, ‘what is the underlying algorithm that I need to implement?’ Then, you'll be given a set of input data and a set of output data, and you have to try to make the input data match the output data,” said Pagnotta, who is also a sessional instructor at Algoma University. “We give you a couple sample questions, you submit your code — and you have to run it against a big data set of test examples.”

While the majority of the curriculum at the School of Computer Science and Technology is theoretical in nature, Pagnotta says the algorithmic programming competition provides students with hands-on experience while applying their theoretical knowledge.  

“It gets students thinking and practicing writing real-world code that they would write on the job, where they have to start thinking about, my end users are going to do some weird things, so I have to account for those as well,” he said. “It’s really good practical practice, and rounds out the student’s education.” 

Saturday’s competition marks the first year Algoma University has hosted a regional qualifier for the ICPC. In previous years, students from the Sault have travelled to Lake Superior State University, Michigan Tech and Northern Michigan University in order to compete in the regionals.  

“We’ve got a pretty good turnout this year,” Pagnotta said. “Hopefully this one goes successfully, and we can get more and more students every semester.”

Sault College has been invited by Algoma University to compete in an invitational programming competition at some point next semester.

RESULTS:

First place: Mind Hack Zombies (Mitchell Petingola, Raj Parui and Hemish Contractor) with four problems solved

Second place: System32 (Arya Patel, Meet Shekhada and Kevin Monpara) with two problems solved

Third place: Kentucky Fried Code (Harmeet Singh Sehra, Rijubak Karmakar and Abraham Ighalo) with one problem solved

Fourth place: Star Children (Ranmali Ranasinghe, Himath Helessage and Riam Basnet) with one problem solved

Regional results can be found HERE.