Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

HPU Wins Hawaii Site of ACM International Programming Contest

Congratulations to the HPU students who placed 1st, 3rd (tie), and 5th in the Hawaii site of the ACM international computer programming contest on Saturday, November 5th:

Team 00FF00: Matt Fry, Dongie Agnir, Kevin Goo (first place)

Team 0000FF: Precious Binas, Abe Pineda, Nathaniel Befus (tie for third)

Team FFFFFF: Aaron Sasaki, Asger Lisborg, Estefania Duterte (fifth place)

(00FF00 is hexadecimal for the color green, 0000FF for blue, and FFFFFF for white)

This contest is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest in the world.

Students compete in teams, with three students to a team. This year there were eight teams competing at the Hawaii site at BYUH in this grueling 5-hour contest. HPU competes in the Pacific Northwest Region which includes Alaska, Hawaii, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, northern/central California and western Nevada. Because of the large geographic area of the region, the contest is held simultaneously at six multiple sites: California, Northwest (Oregon), Northeast (E. WA and Idaho), Puget Sound (Western Washington), Canada, and Hawaii. This year a total of 94 teams competed in our region, including teams from schools such as Stanford, Berkeley, the University of Washington, and the University of British Columbia.

Of particular note, Team 00FF00 solved their first problem in just 7 minutes, ahead of several teams from Stanford and the University of British Columbia, which are two of the top-ranked computer science universities in the world.

HPU has now won the Hawaii site of this prestigious contest three times, in 2003, 2006, and 2011. The Hawaii site for the contest was created in 2003.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, and delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession.

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is a multitier, team-based, programming competition. Participation has grown to several tens of thousands of the finest students and faculty in computing disciplines at almost 2,000 universities from over 80 countries on six continents. The contest fosters creativity, teamwork, and innovation in building new software programs, and enables students to test their ability to perform under pressure. (source: http://www.acm.org and http://cm.baylor.edu/welcome.icpc)

Well done Matt, Dongie, Kevin, Precious, Abe, Nathaniel, Aaron, Asger, and Estefania!