A team of students from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University recently participated in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) South Central USA regional competition at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and qualified to advance to the North American championship round.
The South Central USA region consists of Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. This year, 60 teams from 26 universities participated.
The team, called the Unordered Cartographers, was one of four teams that represented Texas A&M, and it includes Julia Graham (senior), Tanner Hoke (senior) and Nathan Mandell (sophomore). Dr. John Keyser, professor and associate department head of academics, serves as a coach for the students.
With more than 3,000 schools from 111 countries participating in it each year, ICPC is the largest and most prestigious programming competition in the world. Its origins can be traced back to a small competition that was held at Texas A&M in 1970 by members of the Alpha Chapter of the Upsilon Phi Epsilon Computer Science Honor Society.
During the contest the teams were tasked with writing programs to solve as many problems sets as they could within five hours on a shared computer and were then ranked based on that time. One team from each of the top four schools in the region advanced to the national round.
“ICPC is an incredible opportunity to develop not only one’s individual capacity to solve problems and think critically, but also one’s ability to do so under pressure and in a team environment,” said Hoke. “Qualifying to compete in the national contest is exciting, and I’m most looking forward to meeting other students from across North America.”
The Unordered Cartographers will be among 55 other university teams that will compete in the national round, which will be held at the Georgia Institute of Technology near the end of February. The top 18 teams will then go on to compete in the world championship round in Moscow, Russia, in June.