10/29/2009 Tom Hord
Written by Tom Hord
by Tom Hord
For the fourth year in a row, a team of Illinois computer science students is heading to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition world finals. The team took first place in the regional contest on Sunday, October 24th, when teams of students from across the state faced off in a no-holds-barred “battle of the brains.”
Team Bardeen, the first place team, was made up of Illinois graduate students Chi Wang and Qieyun Dai, and Justin Kopinsky, a sophomore. Qieyun Dai is the first female team member from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to qualify for the world finals. Two additional teams of Illinois computer science students competed: Team ILLIAC (Krishan Chockalingam, Thien Nguyen and Rohan Sharma), and Team PLATO (Jaehyn Cho, Thayalan Pirapakaran and Jayanth Madheswaran).
The grueling competition pitted the Illinois teams against ten mind-bending, real-world programming problems, with only five hours to solve as many as possible. Several teams were unable to solve any of the problems, but the two top teams, Team Bardeen from UIUC and another team from the University of Chicago, tied at seven problems solved each. Illinois emerged as the true victor when the judges took into account the time taken to solve the problems and the number of incorrect attempts per team.
“We spent the last hour and a half trying to scrape together an eighth problem (which didn’t end up happening) while biting our nails,” said Kopinsky, the youngest member of the team.
The sparring in Springfield served as a preliminary round to test an entire semester’s worth of knowledge from each team – and to see whose skills reigned supreme. The team from UIUC has been chosen as one of 100 winning regional teams to travel to Harbin, China for the world finals from Feb. 1-6. Out of the last eight years of participating in the contest, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been invited to the world finals seven times.
Once they arrive in Harbin, one hundred teams from six continents battle in another five-hour competition, this time to see who takes home this year’s prizes, accolades and bragging rights as the top collegiate programmers in the world.
The Illinois teams was advised by Yintao Yu and staff adviser Marsha Woodbury. Yu and Woodbury will both travel with the team to the world finals in February.