Nine UCLA engineering students competed at the 28th Association for Computing Machining (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest Nov. 15. The contest, called the ICPC, pitted teams of three university students against each other to solve eight or more complex, real-world problems, with a grueling five-hour deadline. Huddled around a single computer, competitors raced against the clock in a battle of logic, strategy and mental endurance.

The ACM-ICPC World Championship Trophy

Three teams from UCLA competed in the decisive regional round held at Riverside Community College, where they placed 9th, 18th and 25th overall, out of 59 teams. Students from colleges and universities throughout Southern California and Southern Nevada participated. A team from Caltech placed first.

"The competition was very intense," said UCLA computer science student Jason Schroeder. "Some of the teams practice for a year before the competition. Our teams certainly had the skills, but we were lacking on the practice."

The ICPC traces its roots to a competition held at Texas A&M in 1970 hosted by the Alpha Chapter of the Upsilon Pi Epsilon International Computer Science Honor Society. The idea quickly gained popularity within the United States and Canada as an innovative way to train top students in the field of computer science.

"Students can hone their programming, problem solving and teamwork skills," said Richard Park, president of the student chapter of UCLA's ACM, "and the School's computer science department [can] send representatives who will show the community that our department is part of a high-quality institution."

IBM became the sole sponsor of the ICPC world finals and primary sponsor of the worldwide ICPC regional contests in 1997. During that time, the ICPC has grown into a worldwide competition, involving thousands of college participants (over 3,000 teams) from 68 countries during its preliminary rounds through December. Seventy-two teams from around the globe will be selected to compete at the 2004 World Finals, to be held March 28-April 1 in Prague, Czech Republic. Organizers bill it as the ultimate "battle of the brains."

UCLA has advanced to the finals eight times in the past, winning the international competition in 1989. Last year, UCLA's teams finished in fourth, fifth and 16th positions in regional competition. "We have been pretty consistent in the past and we have come close to winning many times," said Vishwa Goudar, vice president of ACM and the chief organizer of this year's UCLA teams.

The ACM ICPC is one of the most prestigious competitions that a young computer science student can enter. Students who do well at the competition are offered job interviews at some of the best technology firms in the world. The winners, said Goudar, "can rest assured that they will land interviews for internships and even permanent positions."

Simply participating in the competition can add credibility to a student's graduate school application, and universities with winning students have been known to raise the point as a sign of their strong engineering programs.

Each team is assigned a 450MHz Pentium III workstation with a Linux platform, and can use C, C++ or Java to solve the problems. Teammates divide problems among themselves or work together depending on the difficulty of the problems, while every moment they operate under intense scrutiny from a panel of expert judges.

Judging is relentlessly strict. The team receives a time penalty for every incorrect solution submitted. The team that solves the most problems, in the fewest attempts, in the least time is declared the winner.

"It was a lot higher pressure than I expected," said David Harr, another UCLA competitor. "Programming for a competition like this is very different from programming in real life."

Nine students - all first-time competitors - comprised UCLA's three teams, which were named UCLA Bruins, UCLA Gold and UCLA Blue. They are Everett Anderson, Timothy Ford, David Harr, Jonathan Lin, Michael Mantel, Jason Schroeder, Stephen Turczynskyj, Alex Weinstein and Daniel Yoon.

-Chris Sutton

11/17/03