Programming Team Spotlight
The GT programming team is a group of students interested in algorithmic programming competitions. The programming team currently consists of 15-20 students who share similar interests. The programming team primarily trains to compete in the ACM ICPC South East US Regional every Fall semester.The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is a multi-tier, team-based, programming competition operating under the auspices of ACM.Tens of thousands of the finest students and faculty in computing disciplines at almost 2,000 universities from over 80 countries on six continents participate in this competition Quite simply, it is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest in the world.
The team competes in various competitions throughout the year. The most important one being The ACM ICPC South East US Regional. Each team has 3 contestants, 1 computer, 5 hours and 8-10 problems to solve. These problems are algorithmic in nature. If the team wins the regional, then they are invited to the World Finals during Spring semester where teams from all over the world come to compete.In the past decade, the Georgia Tech team has been to the world finals 6 times and has performed consistently well in the Regionals. The team also participates in online competitions. Online competitions are held on various websites such as topcoder are individual competitions and are 1 hour 15 minutes long.
During Spring semester, the team also goes for the Mercer Programming Contest which is similar in style to the ACM ICPC Programming Competitions. While the team is coding away and having fun, the experience greatly helps them in real-life situations. Topraj Gurung a Graduate student who coaches the team says "It helps your skills in logically breaking down problems into sub problems to solve these sub problems. These problems require a lot of creativity in solutions, so helps rediscover your creativity. It requires an extensive knowledge of algorithms so helps build your algorithmic knowledge.
To be a part of the team requires you to be a good coder so makes you a better programmer. And finally it is also a lot of fun." Andrew Ash another member of the team said that being a part of he team has helped him a lot. Speed , efficiency, concentration and accuracy are some of the skills that can be honed as a part of the team he added. The team also teaches you working together as a team and sportsmanship. The team has received a lot of support from the faculty. Dean Foley, Cedric Stallworth, Meredith Goodman, Elizabeth Collums, Jennifer Whitlow and the College of Computing have been extremely supportive of the programming team. The faculty has provided the team with space, computers, food, transportation and most importantly, encouragement. The team is extremely grateful for their support. A special person that the team is very grateful to is David Van Brackle. He was former coach of the team at Georgia Tech, and is now the Chief Judge at the South East Regionals, and has helped the Georgia Tech Programming team since 2001. The team practices for the the competitions throughout the year.
The team holds weekly discussions on Thursdays from 6pm-8:30pm on the CoC 3rd floor. Each week they have 3-4 problems that they work on.These problems are algorithmic in nature, and covers topics and ideas such as Graph Theory, Computational Geometry, Dynamic Programming, Greedy algorithms, Number Theory, Data Structures, etc.One week the team discusses problems and the algorithms. The next week they try to code the problems using the algorithms from the previous week. The team usually prefers to code the problems in Java but other languages such as Python, C , C++ are also used. Topraj says "We encourage using Java. Let me explain.
Our philosophy is that programming languages are tools that we utilize to solve problems. In the contest environment, our preferred language is Java because Java is extremely programmer friendly, and also provides libraries, e.g. BigInteger (which handles large numbers), Geometric libraries. After all, it is not the language that matters, but the ideas that matter. In our case, the idea is the solution strategy and whichever language enables us to solve the problem, which over the years we have found Java to be extremely helpful in." On Sundays, from noon-7pm,the team organizes simulated contests at the College of Computing, where they run a contest from 1pm-6pm. Noon-1pm, they discuss various ideas, and 6pm-7pm, they discuss solution strategies for problems in that contest. The team also practices in online contests such as the ones at topcoder.com.
The team has been performing well but they think that they can do much better. Topraj says “Georgia Tech has a top Computer Science program, therefore there are plenty of brilliant and smart people in the College of Computing. We hope to be able to welcome more of these brilliant minds into the GT programming team so that the team environment can be a even more intellectually stimulating experience." Other teams that compete in the competitions, are coached extensively by the faculty. Though the faculty at College of Computing is very helpful, the team would get tremendous boost if the faculty can actively get involved with coaching the team. Oh and did I mention girls? No I didn't because there are no girls on the team.
So if you are girl and reading this, please join the team, they are waiting for you. In March, the team will travel to compete in Mercer. This will be warm-up practice for the regionals in Fall. Here is wishing the team best of luck from everyone at Firewall.
