CCSCNE Programming Competition

The northeastern region of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, or CCSCNE, holds a conference under the same name every Spring in a college in the northeast of the United States. Last year's conference, CCSCNE 2008, was held April 11 - 12, 2008 at Wagner College, Staten Island, NY, while this year's conference, CCSCNE 2009, was held April 24 - 25, 2009 at SUNY Plattsburgh, Plattsburgh, NY.

The conference hosts workshops, poster sessions and an ACM-like Computer Programming Contest. Although most of the workshops are faculty-targeted, I found the poster session to be pretty interesting [I'm considering participating next year], and the programming competition, well, exciting!

A team from Bard College, of which I was part, joined the past two conferences for the programming competition. The team was composed of Wayne Yu Wu, Maksim Tsikhanovich and myself, and we had as advisers professor Robert McGrail last year (2008), and professor Sven Anderson this year (2009). A picture of the team, taken this year, follows below:

The programing contest involves teams of students coding solutions to a list of 5 problems on one computer (that is, only one computer per 3 people, so you have to take turns solving the problems on paper and submitting them). You get your result immediately (whether the solution you submitted works for all the test cases), and you are scored for the sum of the times you solved the problems in. Re-submissions are allowed, without any penalty other than the time you lost submitting it, getting the result, figuring it out and re-submitting. Coding is done in Java, C, or C++. We did it in Java, as Maksim was better than us at the actual coding and his strength was Java... And Java and C are pretty alike, so I could code my part [with some help].

I don't really know what number we ended in 2008, as we left the competition before the banquet, but this year we solved all the problems and ended up number 7 out of 29 (due to the time it took us to figure out bugs in the program)... which is pretty decent anyway...

I can just hope we can do better next year. Oh, yes, and maybe a poster next year too, featuring my research at UH or my research at Bard, or maybe two posters :)