Programming Club shows out at recent UW competition

On Feb. 25, the Western Washington University Competitive Programming Club competed in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) regionals at the University of Washington against more than 50 other teams from the region.

After practicing for multiple quarters, two teams of three people from WWU entered the Division II section of the competition, and won first and second place among teams from Washington.

The Competitive Programming Club has a mission of helping students gain helpful skills for job-finding, while having fun. It’s a fancy name on a resume, but it also provides a stress-free environment to meet people and practice for interviews/programming competitions. Members aren’t required to compete but are informed of upcoming competitions and are surrounded by people who they could team up with.

The morning of the competition, the team left their hotel and arrived at UW at 9 a.m., got settled in, and went over the rules. At 11 a.m., the competition began. Each team was given 13 programming problems of varying levels of difficulty.  Each would have to try to solve as many problems as they could (and pass runtime limits) within the next five hours. A balloon was delivered to teams for each problem they completed. At 4 p.m., the competition ended. Throughout the competition, a leaderboard was available, but the leaderboard is frozen an hour before the competition ends to add a bit of secrecy to who will win in the end.

After the timer ran out, the team gathered as the ICPC revealed the final leaderboard by showing the competitors how many more problems each team solved in the last hour, one by one.

After lots of leaderboard excitement, it was revealed that the WWU Binary Bandits, which included Joe Ewert, Owen Wright, and Indie Cowan, got second place in Washington and 17th in the Pacific Northwest.

Then it was revealed that the WWU Generative Pre-Trained Transformers, which included Ethan Temple, Joey Capps, and Sky Duryee, got first place in Washington and fifth place in the Pacific Northwest. The team celebrated with a dinner in Seattle.

The Competitive Programming Club is excited to participate in more contests throughout the year and bring home more titles. Congratulations to the competitors for bringing home medals and plaques! The club wished to thank Robin Preble for leading the club as president this year, and to See-Mong Tan for being its faculty advisor.

The Competitive Programming Club is always open to new members and is education centered. If you want a fancy-sounding extracurricular and medals on your resume, as well as the skills to pass a technical interview, come join the clubs in the spring! Open to all students who have completed CSCI 141 or have equivalent experience; find out more here.

PHOTO ABOVE: Western's two programming teams gather to watch the results after the competition