Collegiate Programming Contest Research Articles

Competitive programming participation rates: an examination of trends in U.S. ICPC regional contests

A wide range of benefits have been posited from participation in competitive programming contests. However, an analysis of participation in north American regional contests in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) shows that participation in these contests is sharply declining, coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, prior to the pandemic, while the number of teams participating in regional contests was increasing, the number of institutions sending teams to these contests was declining. We find several statistically significant correlations that may underscore structural reasons for this trend. Consistent participation in contests and the number of teams per institution sent to a contest both are correlated with likely participation in future contests. On the other end of the spectrum, institutions sending a team to a contest for the first time in 3 years were much less likely to return in the next year. For this category of teams, if a team is unable to solve any problems in the contest, the institution is significantly less likely to send a team in the next year. Many of these contests have very challenging problem sets, and consequently, have many teams that fail to solve any problems. This result suggests that structuring the problem sets to increase the likelihood that most teams successfully complete problems would broaden participation in these contests.

EVALUATION OF A CITY BRAND AND ITS INFLUENCE ON TOURIST SATISFACTION

The evaluation of a city, as a brand, is essential for professionals who manage the marketing and communication strategies aimed at attracting potential visitors to the location. This study investigates the applicability of an instrument for evaluating a tourist destination as a brand. The study was applied in the city of Porto, Portugal, elected best European destination in 2012, 2014 and 2017 by the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC, 2020). In particular, the level of awareness, image and quality perceived by visitors to the city was assessed. The relationship between these dimensions and tourist satisfaction was also verified. Using a quantitative approach, the instrument, initially created by Konecnik and Ruzzier (2006), was adapted and applied to a convenience sample made up of young Portuguese adults who were visiting or had visited the city of Porto. The results showed that the four dimensions of the original scale had an acceptable reliability coefficient and provided relevant results about the city under study. In general, visitors expressed positive levels of "awareness", "image", "quality" and "satisfaction" in relation to the city of Porto. Variables from all three dimensions (awareness, image and quality) were detected that influenced the variables of satisfaction.Â

Recommending Tasks in Online Judges using Autoencoder Neural Networks

Programming contests such as International Olympiads in Informatics (IOI) and ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) are becoming increasingly popular in recent years. To train for these contests, there are several Online Judges available, in which users can test their skills against a usually large set of programming tasks. In the literature, so far few papers have addressed the problem of recommending tasks in online judges. Most notably, as opposed with traditional Recommender Systems, since the learners improve their skills as they solve more problems, there is an intrinsic dynamic dimension that has to be considered: when recommending movies or books, it is likely that the preferences of the users are more or less stable, whilst in recommending tasks this does not hold true. In order to help the learners, it is crucial to recommend them tasks that are challenging but not unsolvable compared with their current set of skills. In this paper we present a Recommender System (RS) for Online Judges based on an Autoencoder (Artificial) Neural Network (ANN). We also discuss the results of an experimental evaluation of our approach in both the scenarios in which we consider, or not, the intrinsic dynamic dimension of the problem. The ANNs are trained with the dataset of all the submissions in the Italian National Online Judge, used to train students for the Italian Olympiads in Informatics.

An alternative to programming contests

Programming contests, such as the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) have many benefits for undergraduate students studying computer science. These include encouraging collaboratio...

Increasing Employability of Indian Engineering Graduates through Experiential Learning Programs and Competitive Programming: Case Study

Background, Motivation and Objective With regard to engineering, there have been serious concerns about the employability of Indian graduates. There are alarming statistics in a NASSCOM report, which estimates that, of the 3 million joining the IT workforce, only twenty five percent of graduates with engineering background are employable. The figures are grave in the context of graduates from sciences and humanities, which is less than fifteen percent. Aspiring Minds has been administering a computer-based test called AMCAT to lakhs of students in 650+ engineering institutions measure employability of technical graduates. This considers parameters like Business Communication & English, Logical & Numerical skills, analytical & problem-resolution skills and coding. The results are a revelation, 47% of graduates cannot be employed in any domain or sector of the knowledge economy. 17.91%, 3.67% and 40.57% are the employability figures for software services, software products and BPO. Only 3.84% graduates are start-up ready and 6.56% are design job ready and the same trend for other core engineering jobs. There is an urgent need to improve employability of our engineering graduates. This calls for lateral thinking and out-of-the-box initiatives such as experiential learning programs and competitive programming; implementations of which we explore in a top-ranking private university as a case study. Statement of Contribution/Methods The case study of implementation of initiatives in experiential learning programs and competitive programming in a private university is highlighted. An Experiential learning program titled Live-in-Labs as part of the curriculum is explored. This program is student-centric, learner-centric, participatory and hands-on and they provide students an avenue to apply their acquired engineering knowledge, concepts and skills and deploy on a real-time basis in India’s villages. It’s Course Outcomes (CO) such as human-centered design concepts to document observations and user experiences, user-needs assessment and prioritization are enlisted. A very strong mapping to several Program Outcomes (PO) is observed unlike various regular courses in curriculum. Structured competitive programming initiative in which students compete with others in a contest environment in parameters such as program correctness, execution time, and development time is yet another effort towards student-centered learning. Platforms such as CodeChef, HackerRank and contests such International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), which is considered as the Olympics of Collegiate Programming with annual participation of 50,000 students in 2000+ universities in 100+ countries are efforts in this direction. Competitive Programming initiative’s learning objectives also spans several POs. Results, Discussion and Conclusions. Strong mapping of COs to POs inherent in the experiential learning programs improves the employability as also the progression and prospects of the students. Live-in-Labs® program exposes students to pressing issues confronted by village communities in India, through experiential learning opportunities, in order to apply theoretical concepts into application & deployment, by the devising of innovative technology remedies, and facilitation of crucial and collaborative problem-resolution capabilities of the students participating in the program. The participation of several students from foreign universities also enriches learning, collaboration and diversity. Every Live-in-Labs project results in a student paper published in reputed journals and conferences. It also improves student progression in terms of higher studies and high-paying jobs. Competitive programming dramatically improves student skills and capabilities in problem solving, coding, team work, innovation and creativity. It is also observed that code geeks from competitive programming initiatives are invariably the ones to secure the highest paying jobs in dream companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook.

Принципы формирования олимпиадной команды по программированию

The issue of organizing and training a team for participating in collegiate programming contests has been considered. The principles of team-formation, along with the role of each member, based on psychological intellection features and competency level, have been developed. The classification of intellection types was chosen based on typical or non-typical problems and operational intellection procedures. Often in programming contests there are problems that can be reduced to the knapsack problem. Given in the paper is a system of exercises that can be reduced to the knapsack problem. The exercises have been arranged in order of ascending complexity. First, the unlimited knapsack problem and different algorithms for solving it are considered. For the special case of this task, when the value of the item is equal to its weight, the algorithm and its various implementations are presented. The developed training system and the team-formation principles allowed to achieve great result, pagebreak in particular, to go through the internal qualifying stages and adequately perform in the International Collegiate Programming Contest, which confirms the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

High Risk, High Reward

My journey in leadership and entrepreneurship started in college. I aspired to be more than just a typical college student. I became active in managing and creating college clubs and involving myself in the organization of and participation in different programming competitions. Moreover, I provided facilitation, training, and support for students to get involved in local, regional, and international competitions, such as IEEEXtreme, Google Code Jam, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Arab Collegiate Programming Contest (ACPC), and several others. I participated in creating the local Student Branch of the IEEE at my university, the Arab American University in Jenin, Palestine, and managed it for a short period before my graduation.

University of Central Florida Takes the Bronze at Annual International Programming Competition

Three programming team members from the University of Central Florida traveled across the world to compete in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, ultimately earning the bronze medal. Team member Timothy Buzzelli reflects on his World Finals journey and the training and guidance that led to victory.

Students motivation for adopting programming contests: Innovation-diffusion perspective

Within the context of Rogers theory of perceived attributes, authors propose a framework that can predict students’ motivation to adopt programming contest like ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). In this paper we investigate the attributes for adoption of programming contest in a social group comprising of (N = 1245) undergraduate engineering students from the regional finals of the contest held in India over a period of 3 years. The results revealed that student motivations are strongly associated with attributes like relative advantage, compatibility, ease of use, peer influence, perceived enjoyment and perceived usefulness. Overall, students expressed positive attitude towards adopting programming contests as it helped improve their problem solving and programming skills and overall employability. Both gender was in agreement that joining and winning programming contests is a status symbol.

OJPOT: online judge & practice oriented teaching idea in programming courses

Practical abilities are important for students from majors including Computer Science and Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. Along with the popularity of ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM/ICPC) and other programming contests, online judge (OJ) websites achieve rapid development, thus providing a new kind of programming practice, i.e. online practice. Due to fair and timely feedback results from OJ websites, online practice outperforms traditional programming practice. In order to promote students’ practical abilities in programming and algorithm designing, this article presents a novel teaching idea, online judge & practice oriented teaching (OJPOT). OJPOT is applied to Programming Foundation course. OJPOT cultivates students’ practical abilities through various kinds of programming practice, such as programming contests, online practice and course project. To verify the effectiveness of this novel teaching idea, this study conducts empirical research. The experimental results show that OJPOT works effectively in enhancing students’ practical abilities compared with the traditional teaching idea.

The accuracy of the general practitioner's sense of alarm when confronted with dyspnoea and/or thoracic pain: protocol for a prospective observational study

IntroductionDyspnoea and chest pain are signs shared with multiple pathologies ranging from the benign to life-threatening diseases. Gut feelings such as the sense of alarm and the sense of reassurance...

UPSILON PI EPSILONKnuth draws record crowd to UPE national convention

ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest UPE has been a proud sponsor of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest since the fi rst World Finals in 1977. This year’s competition was scheduled for early March in Sharm elSheikh, Egypt, but as the world spotlight turned on the political tensions in Cairo at the end of January, it became increasingly obvious that the Finals could not be held as scheduled. Kudos goes to ICPC Executive Director, William Poucher, for his quick ability to relocate the contest at the end of May, in Orlando, Florida, USA.

Confessions of a working group junkie

For years I have attended ITiCSE in exotic locales, only to be willingly sequestered in unremarkable rooms for days, trying to hammer out optimal wording for papers under strict time constraints. Why do I do this to myself? Is it the twinges of guilt I feel for attending ACM's ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest) all these years, where I get to relax while watching my teams struggle against the clock with blockbuster programming problems? My answer is a resounding NO!

굼벨 분포 모델을 이용한 표절 프로그램 자동 탐색 및 추적

ABSTRACT Studies on software plagiarism detection, prevention and judgement have become widespread due to the growing of interest and importance for the protection and authentication of software intellectual property. Many previous studies focused on comparing all pairs of submitted codes by using attribute counting, token pattern, program parse tree, and similarity measuring algorithm. It is important to provide a clear-cut model for distinguishing plagiarism and collaboration. This paper proposes a source code clustering algorithm using a probability model on extreme value distribution. First, we propose an asymmetric distance measure      to measure the similarity of   and   . Then, we construct the Plagiarism Direction Graph (  ) for a given program set using      as edge weights. And, we transform the  into a Gumbel Distance Graph (  ) model, since we found that the      score distribution is similar to a well-known Gumbel distribution. Second, we newly define pseudo-plagiarism which is a sort of virtual plagiarism forced by a very strong functional requirement in the specification. We conducted experiments with 18 groups of programs (more than 700 source codes) collected from the ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest) and KOI (Korean Olympiad for Informatics) programming contests. The experiments showed that most plagiarized codes could be detected with high sensitivity and that our algorithm successfully separated real plagiarism from pseudo plagiarism.Keywords:Pseudo-Plagiarism, Plagiarism Detection, Source Code Clustering, Gumbel Distribution Model, Local Alignment

You Can Teach an Old Magician New Tricks

John P. Bonomo (bonomojp@westminster.edu) is an associate professor of computer science at Westminster College. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in physics from Catholic University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University. He has served as a judge and problem contributor for the International Collegiate Programming Contest several times, most recently in 2008. His interests outside of academia focus primarily on his wife, his three children, bridge, and a plethora of Japanese puzzles, including Heyawake, Nurikabe, and Fillomino. He is the current holder of the Geek Professor of the Year award at Westminster, much to the chagrin of his children.

A new paradigm for programming competitions

The annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest produces a competitive paradigm that is at odds with the pedagogical goals of modern computer science and software engineering degree programs. This paradigm stresses the fast completion of a programming task and evaluates the results solely with black-box testing specified by the judges. In contrast, the pedagogical goals of contemporary college degree programs in computing emphasize the quality of processes inherent in software development and implementation. In 2007, the College of Charleston student chapter of the ACM hosted its annual high school programming competition by turning the conventional programming paradigm on its head to focus on quality-of-process rather than time-to-complete. The judging criteria included both technical and artistic merit. The implementation of the competition emphasized success by giving students working skeleton solution programs. This paper presents the motivation for the new paradigm, the details of its implementation for the 2007 competition, and the details of the new techniques for judging technical and artistic merit.

Observations on teamwork strategies in the ACM international collegiate programming contest

Observations on teamwork strategies in the ACM international collegiate programming contest

Programming contest strategy

Each year the ACM hosts a truly international programming contest – the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Dating back to a contest held by Texas A&M University in 1970, this annual event, along with the associated regional contests, has grown to 5606 teams from 1733 universities in 84 countries (in the year 2006). Despite the maturity of the event, and the number of competitors, there has never been a systematic examination of contest strategy. Herein several strategies are proposed and examined to determine whether a team can gain an advantage by choosing a good strategy; and, if so, then what that strategy should be. We show that a team can gain an advantage by choosing a good strategy, but that there is no one best strategy. A team must choose between winning by number of solved problems and winning by points. Finding the optimal strategy to win by problems is shown to be NP-complete, while to win by points a team must solve problems in order from easiest to hardest.

Structure, Scoring and Purpose of Computing Competitions

We identify aspects of computing competition formats as they relate to the purpose of these competitions, both stated and tacit. We consider the major international competitions - the International Olympiad for Informatics, the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, and top coder - and related contests whose format merits consideration. We consider the operational impact and possible outcomes of incorporating several of these aspects into scholastic competitions. We advocate, in particular, that contests be designed so as to provide a rewarding experience and opportunity for achievement for all competitors; not just the winners. Specific contest elements that should be considered are: (1) real-time scoring and feedback, (2) rewards for testing and test case creation, (3) tasks with graduated difficulty, (4) collaborative tasks, (5) practice contests and entry-level contests for novices, and (6) inclusion of spectators.

How Do You Stack Up?

John P. Bonomo (bonomojp@westminster.edu) is an associate professor of computer science at Westminster College. He has both a B.S. and an M.S. in physics from Catholic University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University. He has served as a judge and a problem contributor for the International Collegiate Programming Contest several times, most recently in March, 2004. His interests outside academia focus on his wife and their three children (who served as inspiration for this article). He also fancies himself an excellent bridge player, but he is mistaken.