One hundred and twenty eight teams of computer programmers flooded into the Rapid City Civic Center Wednesday morning. Students from all over the world competed in the 41st annual International Collegiate Programming Contest world finals. They buckled down at the computer for five hours translating word problems into computer code.
Over 100 cubicles are lined up alphabetically by university in the Civic Center Ice Arena. Each seats three programmers. The languages differ from table to table.
But contestants are also fluent in two other languages—math and coding.
Teams quietly discuss word problems and type out answers in code.
There are 12 questions. Most are a two or three paragraphs long and sound complicated. One reads …
You are a middleman in the widget market. Your job is to buy widgets from widget producer companies and sell them to widget consumer companies. Each widget consumer company has an open request for one widget per day…
And it goes on to tell competitors to maximize the widget profit.
Cubicles are equipped with a camera that points at the teams so coaches can see a live stream of their work. But a small crowd watches and whispers from the bleachers.
In the arena, fans can keep track of who is in the lead from the large score boards and…balloons. Every time a team answers a question correctly, volunteers place a balloon at their cubical. Each color represents a different question but contestants don’t have to answer in order.
The first correct answer came five minutes into the competition. Cubicles continue to form unique bouquets of balloons through the morning. Some teams have six balloons before the two hour mark.
With one hour to go, score keeping is turned off to the public and teams privately submit answers.
The arena slowly fills with noise as programmers stand up and let out sighs. They file into the hallway with their balloons and meet friends, family and coaches. Groups hug and pose for photos as they wait for the deciding scores from the last hour.
Eventually everyone crowds into the theater. Contest organizers take the stage and reveal the rankings.
St. Petersburg ITMO University has won the contest seven times since 2004. Four of the five top placing schools this year were Russian. One of them was the Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology.
Lockett: “So the first and last names, how do you pronounce both of them?”
Zhuk: “Artsen Zuhk.”
Semenov: “Konstantin Semenov.”
Lockett: “How long have you guys been coding?”
Zhuk: “Like for 8 years in competition.”
Lockett: “Why do you guys put so much effort into coding?”
Zhuk: “This maybe will be helpful in applying to some high tech companies like Facebook and Goggle. And also, we travel a lot. We visited maybe five of six countries only this year during competition. It’s always fun to visit so many countries.”
Semenov: “That’s the best what we can do.”
The two have been competing in other programing competitions for 10 years and have won various medals.
The United States didn’t make the top 12. South Dakota School of Mines and Technology received honorable mention but did not place.
Matt Dyke is a member of the Mines team. He says they’re proud of their work in the competition.
“It’s a big deal, especially since it’s hosted in Rapid City this year. It’s a huge honor to represent the city and the school. Our goal was to get two problems done. We got two problems done. We were close on a couple more. So we’re tremendously excited with how it turned out.”
He says Mines and many other U.S. teams were behind because they don’t learn coding early on.
“I hadn’t started until college. And that’s pretty typical for American students. Most of us don’t learn coding in High School. Even if you do it’s pretty simple. It’s not the type of problem solving coding that you do here. And so from that perspective, certainly we are kind of underdogs. We don’t have the long training sessions.”
Another team member is Alex Iverson. He says he started coding at home when he was seven. Iverson says the U.S. needs to incorporate more coding into schools and fix math to stay ahead internationally.
“Math educations is horrible. What high school did their best to teach me is that math is awful. What my parents taught me is that math is awesome and it’s extremely useful. The way the school teaches math right now makes people not want to do math. And I think if people teach programing the way they teach math, it would just make the situation worse. So we need to figure out how to fix that first.”
He says training was his favorite part of the competition because he learned more about problem solving.
“The most important thing that I learn and I think anyone learns from competitions like this is the skill of looking at a problem and spending more than five seconds on it without giving up. What we’ve been training to do is to able to spend five hours working on these problems without giving up and maybe we’ll even solve two of them.”
Iverson says these are skills he can take with him into the work force. The University of South Dakota also received honorable mention. Next year’s International Collegiate Programming Contest is scheduled to take place in Beijing, China.