Congratulations to SFU Red!  SFU Red challenged well at the ACM Programming Contest World Finals in San Antonia, Texas on April 12, 2006. As a result of their hard work and dedication they earned a 19th spot in the final results.

Computercontest

By Julian Worker
May 4, 2006

In our increasingly interconnected world, it has been speculated that everyone on Earth is related to everyone else by no more than six degrees of separation. In this problem, you must write a program to find the maximum degree of separation for a network of people.

Sounds difficult? Not for SFU student computer programmers who recently ranked among the top 20 teams at the Association for Computer Machinery – International Collegiate Programming Contest ( ACM-ICPC) World Finals in San Antonio, Texas.

In five hours, SFU’s red team - Aaron Chan and Nhan Nguyen, 3rd-year computing science students and Simon Lo a 4th-year computing science student - answered 10 difficult questions like the one above. Says Lo, “I solved that question in 23 minutes. It was the easiest one.”

Solutions had to be written in computer code and then submitted to the judges for immediate testing. Teams were ranked by the number of correct answers submitted within the five hour time limit. A wrong answer netted a 20 minute penalty.

Nguyen, an international student from Vietnam, won his country’s national computer science contest in 2001 after practicing his skills for up to six hours a day, five days a week.

“Obviously, they did really well,” says the team’s coach Brad Bart, a lecturer in the school of computing science. “I am very pleased for them.”