In a momentous win, 15 Oregon State University undergraduate students took the top spots in Oregon in the prestigious International Collegiate Programming Contest’s Pacific Northwest regional competition.

Shaurya Gaur, a computer science student and president of the OSU student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, helped organize the group’s participation in the contest.

“I competed last year and I loved working with others to solve these fun problems. Ever since, I’ve enjoyed competitive programming, and I wanted to keep doing it with my friends,” he said.

Computer science major Teresita Guzman Nader joined the competition hoping to build skills that might be valuable in a future career, and was pleased with the outcome.

“I improved my skills to work in a team of engineers, and I think this experience will help me to be a better team player in my future work environment,” she said.

While students enjoyed having the opportunity to compete, they wanted to hone their programming skills as well. “I set a goal to learn and practice new algorithms last year and there was no better way to achieve it than with the ACM club at the competition,” said computer science student and club vice president Matt Morgan.

RESULTS

ICPC Oregon Division 1

• First place: Beavs’; DROP TABLE Teams; (Shaurya Gaur, Matt Morgan, Miklos Bowling)
• Second place: Hacky Stack (Allen Benjamin, Arshia Soleimanimoorchehkhorti, Zachary Taylor)

ICPC Oregon Division 2

• First place: Time Limit Exceeded (Wei Yu Tang, Jia Wei Cheng, Blake Cecil)
• Second place: chmod 555 (Derek Williams, Teresita Guzman Nader, Milan Donhowe)
• Third place: rm -f * (Sadie Thomas, Myles Scholz, Phillip Bindeman)