Three Stanford students will be traveling to Harbin, China this February to compete in the World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest, an annual competition sponsored by IBM.
Jaehyun Park ’12, Jeffrey Wang ’10 and first-year computer science graduate student Philipp Krähenbühl will be competing against more than a hundred teams in a five-hour problem-solving and programming race.
Teams in the contest receive one computer and have eight or nine problems to solve. The problems often have real-life analogies, such as writing a program to find the shortest path from one city to another, similar to calculations done by GPS systems. Park recalled a problem from a previous contest in which a rectangular window had shattered and teams were asked to write a program that would rotate the pieces and reassemble the window. Last year’s finals also asked teams to write a program that would coordinate incoming flights at an airport.
Park, Wang and Krähenbühl have been preparing for the contest for months. They were first selected from Stanford’s local contest to compete in the Pacific Northwest Regional Preliminaries in November, where they came in second, qualifying for the finals along with 18 other teams in the United States.
Since then, they have been practicing together every weekend, coached by computer science graduate students, including many who are former participants of the contest.
“We do one practice contest a week,” Wang said. “Yes, that’s five hours.”
Though the practice hours are grueling, the team is confident in their ability to work together in competition.
“I think we work together really well,” Park said. “We communicate well with each other.”
This is Park’s second year participating in the contest and Wang’s third. Both competed in similar contests during high school and have extensive experience in programming under pressure. (Krähenbühl could not be contacted due to travel.)
Park cautioned that the team’s experience alone was not enough to win the competition.
“It’s not only about knowledge,” he said, “it’s about creativity.” Wang echoed Park’s description of the competition, saying, “It is a programming contest, but at the heart of it, it’s really problem-solving.”
Despite the pressure and intensity of the contest, Park said that he finds the contests a lot of fun. He explained that solutions are checked instantly upon submission so the team will know whether to move on to the next problem or keep working on a program that has been rejected. “But when your program is accepted,” he said, “I can’t explain . . . it’s so exciting!”
This year the World Finals will be hosted by Harbin Engineering University, which has prepared several sightseeing events for the competitors.
“There’s an ice sculpture festival going on, which should be a lot of fun,” Wang said.
However, the focus of their week in Harbin will be the contest itself, where Stanford’s team will be facing stiff and diverse competition. Over one hundred teams come from all over the world, including teams from Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Moscow and Tokyo. According to Wang, the Russian and Chinese schools are usually the fiercest competition, though MIT always sends a strong team as well.
Despite the stiff competition, Stanford is one of two universities, besides the St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics, that have won the World Finals three times — in 1985, 1987 and 1991.
Stanford finished 20th last year, but this year the team is determined to raise the bar. 12 medals are awarded at the contest — four each of gold, silver and bronze.
“We want to do a bit better than last year,” Park said. “We’re aiming to get a medal.”