Ninjas on a Penny Farthing

If you're one of the people I talk to regularily / hang around online in the same sorts of places then no doubt you've heard me talking about the ACM Collegiate Programming competition. If not, the basic gist of it is simple - Teams of 3 compete in a period of 5 hours to solve a set of programming challenges - most heavily algorithms based. You're given one computer to use between the three of you, your choice of 3-4 languages (Java, C, C++ and Delphi - I say 3-4 because Delphi / Pascal is conditional on where you take part) and you then compete. It starts out in regional contests and then proceeds to an international level with teams from each country.

To get straight to the point, Two friends & I competed in the Australia / New Zealand regionals so I thought I'd blog about what was involved, how we went and how it's fired up the programming competition itch inside of me. You see, of 9 teams in our state (Western Australia), Our team - "James Hales' Incredible Taskforce" - being me, James Hales and Conrad Pogson - took out 2nd place. For a team that had never competed in the ACM competition before and to be honest had very little actual experience with implementing algorithms, We did way better than we (and I think many of the other teams) thought we would.

The most interesting aspects of competing haven't necessarily been our actual score / rank - but rather, the side of effects of preparing to compete. For one, I've spent some time learning the basics of vim - and loving it - (with big thanks to James). It's given me a chance to also learn a little bit more about algorithms in general - something that up until now I'd had almost zero exposure to.

In the same regard, it's made me realise just how much fun it is to compete in situations like this - something I've gotten a chance to help organise this year thanks to RailsRumble. And yes, we'll be opening registrations real soon - delays such as the ACM Programming Comp. have meant that I've been able to spend less time on it than I would of liked to. The next day or two is going to be exclusively dedicated to getting the app to a stage where we can open registration early next week.

The last thing I wanted to note was some of the resources that I'd found helpful - in particular, the Theoretical Computer Science Cheat Sheet and Art of Programming Contest - a really awesome little ebook that covers a bunch of stuff you know for the ACM Comp. I'd also just quickly like to thanks all of the people involved (they'll be posted on UWA CSSE Site sometime in the near future) - Luigi Barone in particular who organised a lot of the stuff for us.