“Gold” Team beat 16 competitors to qualify for World Finals’ wildcard entry
The Vanderbilt computer science Gold Team placed second overall in the Mid-Central Region of the 31st Annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.
The Gold Team consists of three students: sophomores Evan Makowski, Dan Smith and Roger Wu. They beat over 16 other collegiate teams in a five-hour event in Cookeville, Tenn. by correctly solving six out of the seven problems they were given.
The Gold Team placed second behind a team from Northwestern University, who completed all seven problems correctly.
The Gold Team also won first place at the Tennessee Technological University site — one out of 10 sites where duplicate contests were simultaneously held throughout Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee — before moving on to the regional competition.
“We are very proud of the programming team,” said Dan Fleetwood, chair of the electrical engineering and computer science department. “I had Makowski, Smith and Wu in my freshman seminar last year, and I couldn’t be happier about their accomplishments.”
“The computer science department thinks it speaks very well for the quality of the program and the students here in general at Vanderbilt,” he said.
During the competition, a team of three people uses one computer to solve seven to 11 problems in five hours, Wu said.
“A team basically needs to write the code for a program that will generate the correct output when given a specific input,” he said.
Because the Gold Team placed second, they are now eligible to compete as a wildcard entry in the International World Finals to be held in Japan this spring, said computer science professor Larry Dowdy.
Two other Vanderbilt teams competed in the competition. The Vanderbilt Black Team, composed of Matthew DeVries, Andrew Jallouk and Ari Wilson, placed 21st overall and fourth at the Tennessee Tech site.
The Vanderbilt “Commodore” Team, consisting of Kyle Prete and Aaron Stannard, also competed at the Tennessee Tech site.
