Five teams from UW CSE participated in the Pacific Northwest Regionals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, held last Saturday November 2nd. UW competes in a region that stretches from California up to Canada and over to Hawaii. The contest is held at several different sites simultaneously. Allison Obourn traveled with our five teams to the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma to compete.
We placed 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th among the 15 teams competing at the UPS site. In the overall region – which included 117 teams – we placed three teams in the top ten (more than any other school), but were beaten by the usual powerhouses like Stanford, Berkeley, and UBC. Our five teams were:
- Lightning (1st at site, 7th at region): Sun Zehao, Hu Jingcheng, Cui Wenbo
- UW Sonic (1st at site, 8th at region): Stephen Jonany, Siwakorn Srisakaokul, Tom Guo
- Amgems (3rd at site, 10th at region): Zachary Iqbal, Jeremy Teo, Sherman Pay’
- aHBvb3CwBLMBieGyBM2A (4th at site, 22nd at region): David Mah, John Mackinnon, Omar Sandoval
- Bit Vector Zero (5th at site, 25th at region): Evan Whitfield, Nicholas Shahan, David Swanson
To earn a spot in the top 10 is a great accomplishment, especially since many of the other schools train for the contest year-round (and we don’t). It is also noteworthy that UW’s top-placing team is composed of three freshmen who are taking the accelerated CSE143X class.
The complete set of results from the Regionals are available here.
UW’s five competing teams were picked at an in-school competition that was held on Saturday October 5. A total of 34 teams competed locally. Many thanks go to our official sponsor Google. Google bought pizza for over 100 people for the in-school contest and provided prizes for the top three teams and swag for everyone, including Nexus 7 tablets for the members of the number one team. Our thanks go to Marion Daly, our campus Google representative. Thanks also go to Allison Obourn who helped run the contest along with our student helper Cody Gibb. Below are the names of the teams that solved three or more problems in the in-school competition:
| Place | Team name | Members | Problems solved | Total time |
| 1 | UW Sonic | Stephen Jonany, Siwakorn Srisakaokul, Tom Guo | 10 | 1216 |
| 2 | aHBvb3CwBLMBieGyBM2A | David Mah, John Mackinnon, Omar Sandoval | 8 | 1285 |
| 3 | Lightning | Sun Zehao, Hu Jingcheng, Cui Wenbo | 8 | 1298 |
| 4 | Bit Vector Zero | Evan Whitfield, Nicholas Shahan, David Swanson | 6 | 924 |
| 5 | Amgems | Zachary Iqbal, Jeremy Teo, Sherman Pay | 6 | 1058 |
| 6 | Wombat Combat | Ben Eggers, Noah Lindner | 6 | 1192 |
| 7 | U1dVRwo= | Sunjay Cauligi, Vimala Jampala, Lars Zornes | 6 | 1307 |
| 8 | elgoog | Yuxuan Zhang, Shuo Wang, Zhiting Zhu | 5 | 969 |
| 9 | PINE Is Nearly Elm | Ryan Drapeau, Simone Schaffer, Tanner Coval | 5 | 996 |
| 10 | SigmaPhiNull | Benjamin Blumberg, David Foulds | 5 | 1012 |
| 11 | Muffin Racoons | Brandon Edgren, Erik Chou, Eli Elefson | 5 | 1024 |
| 12 | ☃ | Brett Boston, Max Sherman, Jack Fancher | 5 | 1068 |
| 13 | Undefined | Mallika Mathur, Danny Vance, Grant Timmerman | 4 | 656 |
| 14 | HMB and David | Brian Griffith, Karthik Palaniappan, David Tran | 4 | 817 |
| 15 | Midgard | Michael Wiktorek, Colby Schimelfenig, Simon Baumgardt-Wellander | 3 | 298 |
| 16 | Soy Sauce | Kuangjie Sima, Shiying Xu, Zhongyue Zhang | 3 | 366 |
| 17 | Memory Leek | Nadav Ashkenazi, Roee Avnon, Hunter Zahn | 3 | 383 |
| 18 | The Freshmen | Stan Hu, Jiaying Jiang | 3 | 389 |
| 19 | Outlaw Mafia Clique | Daniel Gorrie, Aaron Nech, Andy Butler | 3 | 423 |
| 20 | justforfun | Christopher Tjong, Errol Limenta, Danny Christanto | 3 | 513 |
| 21 | 420codeit | Sujit Packiaraj, Noah Siegel, John Stephenson | 3 | 538 |
| 22 | Elephant Ears | Jasmine Singh, Dalton Black, Mason Remy | 3 | 606 |
| 23 | The Blue Screens | Vinod Rathnam, Amit Burstein, William McNamara | 3 | 661 |
Congratulations to all the participants!