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PROGRAMMERS TAKE THIRD AT GOOGLE-SPONSORED CONTEST |
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April 25, 2008
GROVE CITY, Pa. – Two student teams from Grove City College competed on March 29 at the 2008 Carnegie Mellon University Spring Programming Contest, with much success. Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science hosts the competition with support from Google Inc. One Grove City team placed third overall.
The competition consisted of 12 Harry Potter-themed problems. Each team was charged with identifying an appropriate problem-solving method, or algorithm, for each problem and design a data set and produce a computer program to solve it.
“The competition was to solve as many of the 12 programming problems as possible in five hours,” said Dr. David Adams, assistant professor of computer science. Adams added that typically three-person teams solve the most problems, largely due to the extra person on the team, and Carnegie Mellon provides certificates for the top three teams in both the two-person and three-person divisions. This year, however, was different.
Junior Philip Deets of Franklin, Pa., and sophomore Susannah Johnson of Willow Grove, Pa., competed on the team “GCC Wolverines” and freshmen Aaron Mininger of Halifax, Pa., and Shawn Recker of Finleyville, Pa., competed on “Bits and Bytes.” Bits and Bytes placed 11th out of 34 overall, including three-person teams, and GCC Wolverines placed third overall – second in the two-person teams.
“GCC Wolverines managed to solve nine of the 12 problems in the allotted time tying the team in second place,” Adams said. “Ties are broken by considering the time taken to solve the problems plus some penalty modifications for submitting incorrect solutions followed by correct solutions to the same problem. This put our GCC Wolverine team in third place overall outpacing many of the three person teams. We scored second place in the pairs division.”
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