CS@RIT hosts regional programming competition

CS@RIT has once again hosted the Northeast North America (NENA) regional round for the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). This year the contest was held on February 25, with 84 registered teams from 19 universities from New York, New England, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada. In addition to RIT, there were sites at the College of the Holy Cross (Massachusetts), Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT, McGill University (Quebec), Mount Allison University (New Brunswick), and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute - RPI (New York). Teams of up to three students competed to solve the largest number of problems within five hours, using a single computer. The test data is hidden, and the only response the students see is whether their submission is accepted or not, and, if not, they learn whether it produced a wrong answer for some test data or exceeded the allowed time (many problems strive for algorithmic efficiency).

The problems and the final scoreboard are at https://nena22.kattis.com/contests/nena22/standings. The top four universities advance to the North America Championship, from which the top teams advance to the World Finals. Two rookie RIT teams had an excellent performance: RIT-5 (Mohammed Raeesul Irfan Riaz Ahmed, Eric Karschner, and Quinn Tucker) won the contest at the RIT site and placed 13th overall, solving 7 problems. RIT-2 (Kiet Ho, Quan Do, and Viet Dung Nguyen) placed third at our site and 17th overall, solving 6 problems. This places RIT in the 8th place among the universities, and we are in great company: The advancing top four universities are MIT, Harvard, Brown, and McGill. Congratulations to all the participants!

On the organizational side, RIT Professors Ivona Bezáková and Zack Butler oversee the organization of the entire region, serving as the ICPC NENA Regional Contest Director (RCD) and Deputy RCD. Thanks to the NENA chief judge Finn Lidbetter and the entire judge team, the site directors at all six sites, RIT's James Craig for all his help with the technical setup, and those who helped run the RIT site on the day of the contest (Amal Chaaben, Michael Mior, Sean Strout, Weijie Zhao, and students Jake Downie and Mark Ackerman).