2014 Contest:

In 2014 we organized our first contest on Thursday April 3rd. The contest was held in the new Gates Hall on Cornell campus. Weeks prior to the contest, all participants were provided with a virtual machine image (Ubuntu 12.04, pre-installed with C, C++, Java, Python, Eclipse, and various documentation. Six teams of two to three programmers competed for a first, second, and third prize. They were

  • One team from Brighton High School
  • Three teams from Ithaca High School
  • Two teams from West Irondequoit High School

First prize went to a team from Ithaca High, second prize to a team from West Irondequoit High, third prize to a team from Ithaca High, and an Honorable Mention to the other team from West Irondequoit High as they finished close behind the third.

The rules and programming problems are now available, as are solutions provided by Daniel Fleischman (df288 at cornell dot edu) Daniel is an expert on competitive programming and is happy to provide feedback to the teams. Here are some stats:

  • All teams used Java exclusively.
  • "Great Expectations" was solved by all 3 teams that attempted it.
  • Three teams solved "Student Identifiers". A fourth team was very close, but they unfortunately skipped the modulus 1 as a possibility, and the test input had a class of size 1 in it.
  • "Pancakes" was solved by two teams. A third team made an attempt.
  • "Can you build it" was solved by one team. Two other teams attempted it.
  • "Postfix Calculator" was solved by one team. One other team attempted it.
  • "Seek-a-Word" turned out to be tricky. Four teams attempted it. A lot of attempts were close but threw "array-out-of-bounds" exceptions.
  • "Roman Numerals" also is a bit tricky to get right. Lots of cases to think about. Two teams tried to solve it.
  • "Eating M&Ms" was attempted by just one team, but the solution was too inefficient to run within the required 5 seconds.

Participants can receive feedback on their failed attempts.

During lunch, Professor Sirer presented an introduction to Bitcoin, demonstrating a wonderful application of computer science concepts and also pointed out some problems with the approach.

We got some nice press from Cornell Chronicle.

Organizing Team

  • Gordon Campbell: Chair of Computer Science Dept., Dalton School, NYC
  • Fred Deppe: Ithaca High School Computer Science teacher
  • Daniel Fleischman: Operations Research Scientist at Amazon. Cornell University Operations Research and Information Engineering Grad
  • Christopher Fouracre: Cornell University CIS IT Support Consultant
  • Diane Levitt: Senior Director of K-12 Education, CornellTech
  • Vanessa Maley: Cornell University Computer Science Event Coordinator
  • Haobin Ni: Cornell University CS Grad student
  • Robbert van Renesse: Cornell University Computer Science Faculty

Steering Committee

  • Gordon Campbell: Chair of Computer Science Dept., Dalton School, NYC
  • Emma Clark: Cornell University CS undergrad, rep. Women in Computing at Cornell
  • Fred Deppe: Ithaca High School Computer Science teacher
  • Daniel Fleischman: Operations Research Scientist at Amazon. CU ORIE Grad
  • Diane Levitt: Senior Director of K-12 Education, CornellTech
  • Chair: Robbert van Renesse: Cornell University CS Faculty

Sponsors

The event is sponsored by the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University and the Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University.

Please reach out to Vanessa Maley with any questions at vsm34@cornell.edu.