The University of Waterloo's ACM competition teams dominated at the 2016 Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest East Central North America Regional Programming Contest, held October 29, 2016. The programming contest took place at the University of Windsor and was the qualifying contest for the ACM ICPC World Finals for teams from Ontario, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Western Pennsylvania.
All five of Waterloo's competition teams placed in the top 10*, with Waterloo Royal Blue (Jacob Jackson, 2A Computer Science | Timothy Li, 1A Computer Science | Antonio Molina Lovett, 4A Mathematics) placing first and solving all 10 problems in 224 minutes.
"I am very proud of the effort all these students put into the competition," said coach Troy Vasiga. "They have practiced every weekend in October and worked extremely well together as teams."
The 2016 ECNA contest saw 126 registered teams competing for first place in the five-hour, 10 problem contest. The contest included writing algorithms to read input and produce the correct output. The ranking of teams is by number of problems solved, then by penalty time — the number of minutes past the start of the contest when you submit a correct solution to a problem, plus 20 minutes per incorrect submission to a problem.
Every September and October preliminary local competitions are held and are open to all students from all faculties with other competitions occurring throughout the winter and spring terms. Some students come to the University already battle-hardened from the International Olympiad in Informatics, Canadian Computing Olympiad, and Top Coder competitions. Others had learned programming only days before they compete.
Congratulations to all participants and coaches Ondřej Lhoták, Troy Vasiga and student coach Andy Huang for this strong showing.
Waterloo's Royal Blue will represent Waterloo at the ACM ICPC World Finals, to be held in Rapid City, South Dakota, May 2017. They will compete against 130 other teams from around the world who are also the best teams in their particular geographical region.
2016 competition teams -
Royal Blue | first place
Jacob Jackson, 2A Computer Science
Timothy Li, 1A Computer Science
Antonio Molina Lovett, 4A Mathematics
Black | second place
Renato Ferreira, 3B Computer Science
David Choi, 1st Year Masters, Computer Science
Ted Ying, 3B Software Engineering
White | fourth place
Andy Rock, 2A Computer Science
Jeffrey Xiao, 1A Software Engineering
Fengyang Wang, 3A Mathematics
Gold | fifth place
Joakim Blikstad, 1A Computer Science
Sean Purcell, 2A Software Engineering
Farbod Yadegarian, 1A Computer Science
Red | eigth place
Ben Zhang, 2A Computer Science
Felix Bauckholt, 2B Mathematics
Nimesh Ghelani, first year Masters, Computer Science
*Official results
