YSU hosts international programming contest
The International Collegiate Programming Contest, the largest annual multi-tiered competitive programming competition among the universities of the world, held the East Central North America regional competition on the campus of Youngstown State University Nov. 10-11.
88 student teams along their coaches jointed the ICPC contest in the East Central North America (ECNA) region.
32 teams competed in the ECNA regional on the YSU campus. The East Central regional is open to all colleges and universities in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana (except the Greater Chicago area), western and central Pennsylvania and eastern Ontario.
“Competitive programming is a unique sport where contestants rapidly devise software solutions to problems of varying complexity that run within time and space limits," said Robert Kramer, associate professor in the School of Computer Science, Information, and Engineering Technology. "Contestants are judged on whether or not their solutions provide correct answers to testing data and how long it took the contestants to achieve their solution.”
Kramer also serves as the regional director of the ECNA regional contest.
This year the YSU site hosted students from 12 universities in the ECNA region including Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania State University, Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland State University. One student team from YSU also attended the contest.
The contest opening and warm-up practice were held in Meshel Hall Nov. 10 and the next day, the teams competed in the formal contest to solve competitive programming questions within the 5 hours provided.
Students in the Master of Computing and Information Systems program volunteered as the contest volunteers to support this intellectual competition. Robert Gilliland, assistant professor, and Feng “George” Yu, associate professor, of CSIET were the two co-site directors at the YSU site. Brandon Latronica of YSU IT Services provided IT support. CSIET chair, Abdu Arslanylimaz and administrative assistant Sherry Vitullo also helped with the event.