Come join SLU's team!!!!

Each year the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) holds an international programming contest for college students. Students work in teams of three to solve as many problems as possible in a five-hour time period. The available programming languages for the contest are C++ and Java.

Last year's contest involved 8305 teams from 88 countries, competing at 250 different regional sites. The top 105 teams in the world traveled to Orlando, Florida for the world finals. Here are the problems from last year's regionals and the problems from last year's finals. If you want to try these, or to try problems from past regionals, you may submit code online at the ICPC Live Archive and get immediate feedback.

Saint Louis University can send six students (two teams of three) to the regional competition. We'd like you to be one of them.

Interested students should come attend an organizational meeting at 5:00pm on Wednesday, 7 September 2011 in Ritter 121, or the first practice on Monday, September 12, or contact Dr. Goldwasser.

There is also an opportunity to receive university credit for those interested in participating in the contest. This semester, our department is offering a Special Topics course titled Computational Problem Solving (CSCI 293). This course will serve to prepare students for the types of problems seen on the contest. (students are also welcome to participate without registering for this course).

The course is a 1-credit course using the Pass/No Pass grading option. Given the nature of the typical problems, participating students should generally have completed coursework through the level of CSCI 180 (Data Structures) or equivalent. The regular meeting time for the course will be decided at the organizational meeting.