The University of Virginia is sending a team of computer science undergraduate students to compete in the North America Championship final of the International Collegiate Programming Competition to be held May 26-31.
A few weeks ago, eight UVA teams squared off against roughly 110 opposing teams in the Mid-Atlantic Regional round of the International Collegiate Programming Competition. They all performed well: When the standings were finalized, UVA's top team, the Seg Faults, placed fourth which qualified them to move on to the competition's next level. UVA teams also placed fifth and six, for a total of five Wahoo teams finishing in the top 11 and seven in the top 25.
The Seg Faults team members Annabel Li, Edward Lue and Chase Hildebrand, all second-year computer science majors will represent UVA as one of 45 U.S. and Canadian universities in the North American competition, hosted by the University of Central Florida.Radford University virtually hosted the mid-Atlantic round, in which teams had five hours to solve a set of 13 problems that test programming skills, logical abilities and teamwork by designing, testing and building software systems.
“This contest has become very competitive in all stages regional, national and international over the past 10 years,” said associate professor of computer science Mark Floryan, who co-coaches the UVA International Collegiate Programming Competition teams with assistant professor Nathan Brunelle.
“I am proud of our students because we brought more teams to the competition than any other school and all of our teams performed so well,” he said. “It really shows how consistently strong and motivated our students here at UVA are, and it was great to see the top of the scoreboard full of UVA logos!”
The most important factor in Seg Faults' success in the regional round was staying focused for the full five hours of the competition, Lue said.
“It's really easy to get fatigued and discouraged from failing to solve a problem,” said Lue, a biomedical mino. “Continuing to refine that aspect of our performance will be important to us in the next round of competiton and beyond.”