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by Jason Nemcosky '07
Six students from Virginia Wesleyan College, led by Associate Professor of Computer Science Dr. Zizhong Wang, participated in the 2006 ACM Mid-Atlantic USA Computer Programming Contest, hosted by Christopher Newport University. The contest challenges students in areas of math and coding.
The students were divided into two teams, Marlin and Tiger, and each team was comprised of three students. The Tiger team, which went to the competition for the first time, included junior David Weirich, sophomore John Ahigan and freshman Brandon Mohawk. The Marlin team, whose members participated last year, included senior Daniel Proud, sophomore Torrance Zeiler and junior Raichel Link.
"The contest is a well-planned event that occurs simultaneously at several sites along the east coast," Proud said. "The site that traveled to was Christopher Newport University. Each team receives the same eight questions and is given five hours to formulate algorithms and write programs that meet the requirements stated in the problems. The questions are very well-written, and extremely challenging."
Due to the challenging nature of the contest, preparation and practice are required for the teams to do well.
"We began training students a month ago," Wang said. "Preparation is most important. We do our best. This year we had so many good students. The coding techniques are special. You need a long time to train, or you forget. It's not just general knowledge. If you don't do it within a month, you forget."
"This was the second time I went to the competition, and it was even more fun than last time," Zeiler said. "Christopher Newport provided a welcoming and laid-back atmosphere, which takes the edge off feeling pressured for the competition."
The team took home one balloon for their efforts, which meant that they solved one problem successfully.
"The top team only solved five of the eight problems correctly," Proud said.
With the students working in a team, they had to rely on each other to be successful.
"We each had our strengths as far as the team went, and we had a lot of fun with it," Link said. "We looked at each of the problems and used our individual strengths to try and contribute to finding a direction from which to solve them."
"Our strategy for the competition was to have one person typing up the code on the computer while the other two members would be attempting to solve the next problem and lending a hand when necessary to the writer," Proud said.
One thing that everybody agreed on was that the degree of difficulty for these problems was much higher this year.
"The questions were very hard," Wang said. "For even one question, it takes a whole day or several days to solve for the average student. The first question just blew me away. Usually the first question is pretty mild."
"Our team worked really well together since we had two very strong programmers and a really strong math student, which definitely came in use during the math-oriented questions," Zeiler said. "We placed in about the same position as last year, and although we didn't win, the experience is awesome. I had a great time competing and am looking forward to going again for the next two years."
Despite the fact that they did not win the competition, they had a great experience and enjoyed the trip.
"Although our team only solved one of the problems, we worked well together as a team," Proud said. "Although we did not win the overall competition, we were successful. I think the competition was definitely worth the time we put into it. It is always fun to meet people from other schools and to go up against them in a friendly competition. I think it also helps to develop one's skills at working with a group."
"We can still do better," Wang said. "Hopefully next year, we can improve our ranking more."