ACM-ICPC comes to ABV-IIITM, Gwalior

And it arrives, in about time.

ACM, The Association for Computing Machinery, is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession.

The ACM-ICPC, is the Inter-collegiate Programming contest, which is held annually, for teams of 3 university/college students involving algorithmic programming problems. The contest is considered to be the "Olympics of Computer Programming".The Regional Finals would be held on the 3rd and 4th October, 2009. Each Regional finals selects one team as winner of the site and will be eligible to participate in the world finals This year, the world finals will be held in April, 2010 at Harbin Engineering University, Harbin (China).

After the immense success in the previous year's ACM-ICPC held at the Kanpur site, (team brute force from ABV-IIITM, Gwalior wins the Regional finals to land in the World Finals, held at Stockholm, Sweden) the South Asian Kanpur-Gwalior site regionals would be held at ABV-IIITM, Gwalior. IIT-Kanpur has held the regional finals for ACM-ICPC for the past 10 years, and this is the first time that ABV-IIITM, Gwalior would be holding a regional finals for ACM-ICPC. (and many more in the future, hopefully)

A few details about the Regional finals, and how they go about it. Each participating team consists of at most 3 contestants and a coach from the same institution. Generally each team gets 6 to 8 problems to be solved within 5 hours. A team can submit the programs in C, C++ or in JAVA. As my experience as a participant, the tension is immense, and there's excitement throughout the 5 hours, which reaches its peak during the final ending minutes, when last minute submissions lead to a huge change in positions on the scoreboard. ( and as engineering students, we all know how that works! )