3/9/2015 By Laura Schmitt, CS @ ILLINOIS
Written by By Laura Schmitt, CS @ ILLINOIS
For the 8th time in the last 9 years, a team of CS @ ILLINOIS students will be competing in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) world finals, the oldest, largest, and most prestigious computer coding event in the world. The Quadrature Rules team—Joon Young Seo, Ruihan Shan, and Timothy Smith—will compete against 127 other three-person teams for the title of best collegiate algorithmic programmers on May 20 in Marracech, Morocco.
According to CS graduate student and team coach Uttam Thakore, Quadrature Rules qualified for the finals by finishing third in a regional competition that included more than 150 teams. They accurately and quickly solved eight real-world problems, such as devising a maintenance schedule for a shrine that minimized the amount of time the holy site would be closed by efficiently allocating repair workers.
“The solution required binary searching on the possible distance, then making some additional optimizations to ensure that you don't revisit paths you've already tried,” said Thakore, who competed on an ICPC team while he was an undergraduate at the University of Florida. “For all ICPC problems, there is some algorithmic kernel that you have to implement and certain techniques to use.”
As coach, Thakore organizes the practices, directs team members to relevant practice resources, teaches algorithms and data structure, and gives competition strategy advice. He can also tap the expertise of CS Associate Professor Darko Marinov, who serves as a faculty advisor to the group.
To do well in Morocco, the Illinois team will have to solve even more difficult problems by parsing each scenario, deciding which algorithm to apply, and then quickly and accurately writing the code. According to Seo, a CS senior, the team is preparing by practicing together five hours once a week, and individually as much as possible—using online judge sites and doing problems from past competitions.
“It requires a lot of dedication,” said Seo, who competed in the 2013 ICPC world finals when he was a sophomore. “Teams at the highest level—those capable of receiving medals—spend a significant amount of time practicing. I know someone who practices five hours a day just for [the finals]. Everyone on our team is busy with research and classes so it is difficult to find the right balance.”
CS junior Shan agrees with his teammate about the difficulty of fitting practice time into an already full schedule. “The biggest challenge is that I have limited time [to practice] and there are [other] very strong, talented opponents,” said Shan, who is making his first trip to the world finals this year.
The team’s collective experience may make up for some of the lack of practice time. Theoretical and Applied Mechanics graduate student Smith has competed in ICPC four previous years, reaching the 2012 world finals in Poland as an undergraduate at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Said Smith: “We are very grateful for the financial and logistical support the CS department has provided to make our team the most successful team we can be.”