UI team earns trip to world programming championship

URBANA – Three University of Illinois computer science students will go to China for the world championship in programming.

The UI's "Bardeen" team, named for the late Nobel Prize-winning UI physicist, edged out the University of Chicago by five minutes in solving seven of nine difficult programming and logic problems. The 34th annual Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest regional competition was held at the UI's Springfield campus over the weekend.

Other regional bouts continue through December.

The UI and UC teams are among 100 three-person teams that will advance to the World Finals on Feb. 5, 2010, hosted by Harbin Engineering University in Harbin, China.

The problems are not for the faint of brain. Marsha Woodbury, the team's faculty adviser, said they "made my head spin," and several teams were not able to solve any of the nine.

The teams were limited to five hours to solve the problems.

"The problems became far more challenging and were frankly quite tough. We coaches were thrilled when our teams started solving these as the afternoon progressed," Woodbury said Tuesday. "However, it soon became obvious that the winner would have to figure out at least seven problems to break out of the top 10 teams. And that is what happened."

Only the UI and University of Chicago were able to solve the first problem.

"The winning teams had to calm down, read the problem carefully, dig through lots of nuance and realize that the solution was within their ability to find," she said.

Bardeen team members are Chi Wang, a graduate student from China; Justin Kopinsky, a sophomore; and Qieyun Dai, also a graduate student from China.

She is the UI's first female to go on to the championships.

Yintao Yu, also a graduate student, is the team's adviser.

Kopinsky said in an e-mail that the first problem he solved "was a fairly straightforward one about keeping track of how much total memory a series of processes needs, given how much memory each one needs for itself and how much memory it needs for libraries, the latter of which can be shared across multiple processes."

The second one was a less straightforward adaptation of "chutes and ladders," he said, "slightly complicated by the fact that the board could have up to a billion squares on it (although the combined number of chutes and ladders was limited to 40)."

This is the fourth year in a row that the Urbana campus has sent a computer science team to the world programming final. More than 7,100 teams competed.

Dai said there's more to the challenge than brain power alone.

Teamwork is important, she said.

"Of course you need to know different algorithms and be quick to understand what the problem asks, but it's always great to have someone to discuss with and to help you find your bug when the program went wrong," she said.

The problems are designed to test students' knowledge, endurance and business acumen.

Other UI teams that did well in the regional competition were its ILLIAC team, with students Krishan Chockalingam, Thien Nguyen and Rohan Sharma, and its PLATO team of Jaehyn Cho, Thayalan Pirapakaran and Jayanth Madheswaran.

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