Faculty of Science

On Friday October 14 and Saturday October 15 the first Science Atlantic Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science conference was held at St. Francis Xavier University. (Science Atlantic is the new name for APICS (the Atlantic Provinces Interdisciplinary Council on the Sciences) , which has been in existence for 50 years.). One of the events at this conference is the computer programming competition. This year, 17 three-person teams from 10 Atlantic Universities competed. Acadia had two teams: the "Acadia Grizzled Guys" team was composed of seasoned veterans Jake Bruce, Matt Penney and Alex Sanford, while the "Acadia Less Grizzled Guys" was made up of veteran Tyler Corbin and first-time competitors Matt Bluteau and Cody Davison. The teams were coached by computer science professor Jim Diamond.

In this competition the teams were given a set of six problems to solve, and each team had the use of one computer. The competition lasts five hours, during which the teams try to write computer programs to solve as many problems as possible. Ties are broken by the time taken by the teams to solve problems. The teams are allowed to submit a solution as many times as they like, but each incorrect solution incurs a time penalty. The problems are marked by a computed systems, and if there is any problems with the solution, even something as trivial as a word with incorrect capitalization, the solution is rejected with virtually no information about the actual error.

Acadia teams almost always do well, and this year was no exception. The Less Grizzled Guys were the fifth team to submit a correct solution. Unfortunately, while they believe they were close to solving some of the other problems, they did not find their errors in time to score another point, and ended up in 13th place. The Grizzled Guys had a very good day, as they were the only team to solve five of the six problems, taking first place in the competition.

The Grizzled Guys now move on to the next level of competition, which is the ACM Northeastern competition, pitting the top three teams from the Atlantic Provinces against the winner from Quebec and the northeastern US states. This competition is to be held on November 5. The winner of this competition (and similar competitions around the world) meet at the world championships later this year.