Brain battles
[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 5, No. 3
8 June - 12 July 2009 ] By Aurélie Labrière.
A three-person team of informatics undergraduates has out-performed students of all levels at ‘Battle of the Brains’, the world finals of an international computer programming contest in Sweden.
Christopher Chen, Victor Lei and Angus McInnes, all second year New Generation degree students from the University of Melbourne, teamed up for success to finish in equal 20th place from 100 teams at the 33rd annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).
The contest, sponsored by IBM, is informally known as ‘Battle of the Brains’ as it comprises one of the largest and most prestigious computer competitions of its kind.
The team’s coach is Dr Bernie Pope, lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering. Dr Pope is proud of the team, aged 17, 18 and 19, who he says have made a “really remarkable effort and have done excellent work correctly solving five out of ten contest problems during the final.
“The competition reveals the students’ mathematics skills but it also highlights the team’s ability to produce, within a deadline, a quick but thorough piece of work under pressure.”
As a strategy, the three students first had a quick look at the problems given, and then shared the tasks to solve them, with one computer between them. Speed is one of the major qualities required for this kind of brain battle with only five hours given to solve the ten problems. The team which solves the most problems in the shortest time wins.
The competitors can use any of the contest languages (currently C, C++ and Java) to generate computer programs to solve each question.
Bachelor of Science student Angus McInnes said that the team was nervous before the competition because they knew that they were facing 99 other teams, possibly including post graduate students, with a lot of previous competition experience.
The team may have had a confidence boost staying at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, as they were excited to learn that it was the same hotel that Nobel laureates reside in before prizes are awarded.
Their achievement is impressive considering that this year’s competition saw more than 7000 teams competing in the qualification rounds from universities in 83 countries, on six continents.
Last September, the Melbourne team gained their place in the finals by winning the South Pacific Regional Contest of the ACM ICPC.
They met for the first time at a training camp run by the Australian Informatics Olympiad Programme while they were at high school, teaming up at university to create a competitive computing team. Dr Pope first met Angus, Christopher (also currently completing a science degree) and Victor (who is studying Commerce) when they were all in the first semester Informatics subject.
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