NUS ACM Student Chapter

A few of us here at the chapter had wanted to organize a programming contest in NUS for quite some time. Not only are competitions a lot of fun but there is also a lot of learning involved in the process and that is why we really pushed for it this semester and finally went about organizing it.

iCode was a purely online programming contest except for the finals that was held in one of the programming labs. The competition which was spread over four weeks from March 16 to April 12 wouldn't have been possible without the support and guidance of Steven Halim from the Faculty of Computing and his competitive programming team. All the problems for the weekly contests and the finals were set by them.

We were thoroughly overwhelmed by the initial response to the contest. Although we sent the publicity mail only to students from the School of Computing, we had nearly a hundred signups by the end of the day. We were tempted to keep the registrations open and bring in more folks to participate but we had to close it in the end as we were keen on keeping the number in check.

Problem sets were released at the start of each week and students were given the length of the week to solve the problems. The leaderboard was updated weekly so that students could keep track of their position in comparison to their peers. Doubts/Questions were directed to Steven.

At the end of the fourth week, Biran, Hoang Le and Hoang Tran Cong emerged as the winners by solving sixteen problems apiece. So, they and twenty others were invited for the finals on April 12 at COM1/PL6.

Here, the participants had the opportunity to meet fellow talented programmers from the Competitive Programming module and were asked to solve as many problems as they could within the stipulated time limit of two hours. In the end, with four questions solved completely, Biran came out as the winner of this year's iCode and took home a brand new iPod 5G. The other winners won free memberships with the Association of Computing Machinery.