Mississippi State University has recently placed in the finals of the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest. In addition, a second MSU team placed within the top 30 out of 100 teams during the regional competition.
“They are all an outstanding group of students,” remarked Dr. Dave Dampier, coach for the regionals. “All six of the students that competed in the Regional Competition were first-rate. The four that will be representing the school in Beverly Hills are among the best we have.”
The Finals team (Maroon) consists of three members, Jay Stenmark, a senior in computer engineering; Davis Herring, a senior in physics; and Vinoad Senguttuvan, a graduate student in computational engineering. Christopher Waters, a junior in computer science, will also attend the competition as the team’s alternate.
The White team consisted of Christopher Waters, a junior in computer science, Courtney Bane, a junior in computer science and Sunil Nandahali, a graduate student in computational engineering. The White team placed within the top 30 out of 100 teams at regionals.
Dr. Dave Dampier, an assistant professor in computer science, served as the team coach for regionals and will also attend the Finals as well. Dr. Donna Reese, associate professor of computer science, has served as the primary coach at the local competition, but due to scheduling conflicts has been unable to attend the regionals or finals.
While the local competition pitted individuals against each other, the top three placing competitors had to work together to form a single team in order to compete in regionals and other competitions.
Herring remarked on working with his new teammates during competition, “After being rivals locally, it was fun to instead compete together against other schools. It’s been said that ‘with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’–meaning that a large group of people is likely to contain someone who will immediately see the solution to a problem in a program. While we worked separately on our problems, one of us typing a solution while the others designed further solutions, when a program didn’t work, we all concentrated on fixing it–six eyeballs instead of two.”
The MSU team, through teamwork, managed to earn a place to compete in the World Finals to be held March 22-25 in Beverly Hills, Calif., during Oscar week.
The competition, which is sponsored by IBM, has drawn more than 23,000 college participants from 68 countries around the world.
Mississippi State placed in the final 70 teams of the World Finals out of a starting 3,850 participating teams. The contest pits teams of three university students against eight or more complex, real world problems. The teams are given a five-hour deadline to solve as many problems as they can. The team that solves the most problems correctly in the least amount of time with the least amount of attempts made will emerge as the international champion, earning scholarships and prizes.
Regarding his feelings on making it to the finals, Jay Stenmark commented, I’m excited about it. This is the first time our school has sent a team to the world finals, and I’m proud to represent Mississippi State University, the College of Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Vinoad Senguttuvan agreed, saying, ” I have always been taught not to make a big deal out of winning or losing. But that day, I did feel real happy for our team and more so for Mississippi State. Going out there and beating some of the top schools in the nation like Georgia Tech and Florida in an intense academic contest, we showed that Mississippi State is a really good school, growing in many aspects and getting better every day.”
The competition, which involves using a semester’s worth of computer programming in one afternoon, involves the use of teamwork to solve the problems, with teammates collaborating to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds, and build software systems that solve the problems while under intense scrutiny of expert judges.
Competing students will also have the opportunity to hear ‘Lord of the Rings” visual effects developer Milton Ngan discuss how Hollywood special effects are being shaped by software innovation in the film industry.
The contest’s roots began with a competition held at Texas A&M in 1970 hosted by the Alpha Chapter of the UPE Computer Science Honor Society. The idea quickly gained popularity within the United States as an innovative initiative to assist in the development of top students in the emerging field of computer science.
The contest then evolved into a multi-tier competition with the first Finals held at the ACM Computer Science Conference in 1977. Since then the competition has grown into a global network of universities hosting regional competitions that advance teams to the World Finals. The competition has become the oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest in the world.
Perhaps that is why Dr. Dampier called for MSU to support the team during the Finals, saying, “The team will be doing their best for MSU in Beverly Hills on March 25. I hope the school remembers them that day and prays for their success.”