Winning the ACM Programming Contest

ACM Contest 2010 A Banner Year Saturday November 6th 2010 Article DNR November 15th

The excellent result achieved in this years ACM Programming Contest, successfully solving 3 of the eight problems is a best result since Bridgewater has had a Computer Science major.  There is a memory from the 1970s of Bridgewater having once won a regional with 4 problem solutions in the days when the contest was held on mainframes and the language was FORTRAN.  We hope to leverage these good result to motivate an even stronger contest preparation.

Vision  Each year the Association of Computing Machinery with sponsorship from IBM corporation and others run the ACM Programming Contest.  The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is an activity of the Association for Computing Machinery that provides college students with an opportunity to demonstrate and sharpen their problem-solving and computing skills says the Mid-Atlantic Region Web Site for 2004.

The vision is that Bridgewater College Wins the ACM Programming Contest.  This is of course a highly ambitious goal.  Nevertheless, the most difficult journey starts with just a single step.  To achieve the vision requires preparation and the project is to put the Bridgewater College teams into contention.

ACM 2003 Bridgewater College Teams	ACM 2004 Bridgewater College Teams
ACM 2005 Bridgewater College Teams

Objectives The objectives that make up a Focus Project are those subsidiary goals that must be accomplished to achieve the Vision.  In the case of the ACM Programming Contest this will involve improvements in preparation and execution, so objectives will involve things like 1) Training Materials, 2) the Training Itself, 3) Rehearsal, and 4) Extensive work on algorithms and practice.