WSU's ACM Takes First Place at International Collegiate Programming Competition

The WSU Student Chapter of ACM took first place in the upper and lower level division in the International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) exhibition held at Eastern Washington University in February.

The winning team included juniors Travis Gomez and Bryan Wisdom for the upper level division. Jeffrey Tremaine and Phillip Marshall took first place in the lower level division. Jeremy Rehkop, Nick Lewis, and Matt Miller also participated in the competition. All WSU teams were coached by Shariful Shaikot, a PhD student of the Computer Science Department, who planned and held training sessions for the competitors bi-weekly during the past semesters with the guidance of Dr. Carl Hauser.

Competing against teams from Eastern Washington, University of Idaho, and other schools, the winning WSU teams were able to solve six out of eight computer programming challenges during the five-hour competition. Problems in the competition ranged from detecting a loop in a simple code to determining whether orbiting satellites could shoot regions of the earth with lasers.

The exhibition competition, similar to the largest and most prestigious of its kind, was put on by Eastern Washington University ACM Chapter. According to the ACM website, the competition "challenges students to solve real-world problems using open technology and advanced computing methods under a grueling, five-hour deadline." The official competition will take place November 2009.

"Winning is always good, but cooperating with other ACM chapters in the region to produce such an exciting competition is great also", said Event Coordinator Dale Cox.