EECS Teams Earn Top 10 Finish in Mid-Central Regional ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest
CoolWildCats were one of only four teams to solve eight problems and MildWildCats were one of the only six teams to have solved 7 problems.
Team CoolWildCats, consisting of NU EECS Students Qinglin Li, Fei Luo, and Yuanhui Yang have placed 4th in the 2015 Mid-Central USA Programming Contest, held on Saturday, November 7, at the University of Chicago. The team nearly finished tied for 1st with three of other teams, if not for a timing inconsistency, as each top four top finisher out of 156 total teams, had solved 8 problems.
This year, Northwestern had four teams (the official limit, not typically used by all competitors). The MildWildCats, featuring Lunrong Chen, Yifei Yang, and Ruohong Zhang achieved acclaim by finishing as one of the top six teams to solve 7 problems. Also competing were the WildWildCats, consisting of Mohammed Khan, Alex Wang, and Muzhi Xu, as well as, Team PurpleWildCats, encompassing Guixing Li and Danqi Lin.
ACM ICPC is one of the oldest programming competitions for university students, sponsored by IBM. Students compete in teams consisting of 3 persons each, and are given a set of 8-10 problems (depending on the year/region) to solve during a period of 5 hours.
In addition to the challenge of the “sheer math” of the problem, the teams are supposed to develop efficient code for the program representing the solution (C++ or Java) and it's typical that the acceptable solutions are expected to run within a given time-limit (specified at the header of each problem – e.g., Time < 1 sec.) and may also be constrained in terms of the memory used. Teams are graded both on the times of submission of correct solutions, as well as on the correctness (e.g., if certain pre-determined tests-cases, not known to contestants, fail – the submission is counted as incorrect and induces negative points).
