Harvard students grab silver in ACM programming contest

A crack programming team composed of Harvard College undergraduates Spencer Liang '12, Alex Zhai '12, and Neal Wu '14 took home the silver in the 2012 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) held in Warsaw, Poland, on May 17.

The 2012 contest included teams from over 2,000 universities at the regional level. Of those, 112 teams advanced through regionals to compete at the world level.

The Harvard group, coached and sponsored by Robert L. Walton '66, solved seven problems in the allotted time for an overall place of seventh, and the title of North American regional champion.

Of the U.S. teams competing at the world finals, only Harvard placed in the top 12, besting students from MIT, Georgia Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and Stanford University.

Called the "Battle of the Brains," the ACM programming contest asks students to solve a number of challenging problems in a limited amount of time.

Over a 5-hour period, students must work as a team to triage problems by difficulty, distill requirements from the problem statement, design and code software to solve the problem, and test their solution. Incorrect solutions submitted incur a time penalty.

Results, World Finals 2012

1. St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics
2. University of Warsaw
3. Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology
4. Shanghai Jiao Tong University
5. Belarusian State University
6. Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) University
7. Harvard University
8. The Chinese University of Hong Kong
9. University of Waterloo
10. Moscow State University
11. University of Tokyo
12. Belarus State University of Informatics and Radio electronics

The ACM-ICPC traces its roots to a local competition held by Texas A&M in 1970. By 1977 it had grown to a tiered competition, with finals being held at the ACM Computer Sciences Conference. IBM took up sponsorship of the contest in 1997.