A TEAM composed of three computer science students from CAS won in the multi-provincial level of the prestigious International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) held at the Cagayan State University (CSU), Carig Campus in Tuguegarao City last Sept. 26-27.

Samuelito Demandante, Raymund Viloria, and Arnie Jay Ibe who call their team “Stallion 1” bagged for MMSU the “Best Performing School in Northern Luzon” award in the competition participated by 15 teams, 13 of which are from Northern Luzon while two are guest teams: University of the Philippines Cebu and Central Luzon State University.

Another team from CAS composed of Tristan Jake Alcantara, Emmanuel Rodriguez, and Manuelito Ortega who called themselves “Stallion 2” ranked sixth in the same tournament.

Lee Carlo F. Simon, one of the teams’ coaches, said it was MMSU’s first time to join the contest sponsored by CSU, University of Saint Louis of Tuguegarao, and the Association for Computing Machineries (ACM). The other coach was Napoleon M. Cacanindin.

Meanwhile, the ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society which delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession. It provides the computing field’s premier Digital Library and serves its members and the computing profession with leading-edge publications, conferences, and career resources.

It is a U.S.-based international learning society for computing that was founded in 1947. It is a not-for-profit professional membership group with more than 100,000 members worldwide.

Since the ACM is solely dedicated to computer programming, it has organized chapters in various private and state colleges and universities in the country, and about a dozen of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) through which it conducts most of its activities.

As of 2013, ACM has professional and SIG chapters in 56 countries in the world aside from its student chapters organized in 41 different countries which include the Philippines.

Contest format

The ICPC is a team competition. Each team consists of three university students who have had less than five years of university education before the contest. The teams are given five hours to solve between 8-12 programming problems with eight typical for multi-regional and 10 for finals. They must submit solutions as programs in C, C++, or Java. Programs are run on test data. If a program fails to give a correct answer, the team is notified and can submit another program.

The team which correctly solves most problems wins. The placement of teams is determined by the sum of the elapsed times at each point that they submitted correct solutions plus 20 minutes for each rejected submission of a problem ultimately solved.

For instance, consider a situation when two teams, Red and Blue, tie by solving two problems each. The Red Team submitted its solutions to problems A and B at 1:00 and 2:45, respectively. They had a rejected run on problem C, but it was ignored since it did not solve C.

On the other hand, Blue Team submitted solutions to problems A and C at 1:20 and 2:00, respectively. It had one rejected run on problem C. Then, the total time is 1:00+2:45 = 3:45 for Red Team, while Blue Team had 1:20+2:00+0:20 = 3:40. Thus, the tie is broken in favor of Blue Team.

Compared to other programming contests such as the International Olympiad in Informatics, the ICPC is characterized by a large number of problems (eight or more problems in just five hours). Another feature is that each team can use only one computer although it has three students. This makes the time pressure even greater.