Ying Wu College of Computing Programming Team Holds Their Own at Annual ICPC Competition

Two teams of NJIT Cheetahs and Tigers entered the lion’s den of the leading collegiate programming contest in the world and left with pride for placing in the upper half among some of the top institutions in the New York region at the annual International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).

Jaden Nguyen, president of Ying Wu College of Computing’s (YWCC) Programming Club, and his five fellow student members, most of whom are freshman and sophomores, traveled with nervous anticipation to Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. for this year’s event to join a total of 76 teams comprised largely of third and fourth-year students from high profile institutions including Cornell, Columbia, Princeton and Yale.

ICPC hosts over 3,000 universities from 111 countries in 400 on-site competitions. Winning teams in the regionals advance to compete in national finals and a world championship. As such, the battle is nothing less than fierce.

The contest involves what Nguyen calls “brain teasers requiring fundamental programming skills and creative thinking.” Teams, three to a computer, must attempt to solve 10 problems of varying difficulty - from easy to extremely challenging - during a 5-hour period.

Although the Tiger team, consisting mostly of international students from Vietnam, may not have done as well as they would have liked, the Cheetahs answered five out of 10 questions correctly and ultimately beat half of the Ivy League teams by raising their ranking from 42 to 33 when they solved the ninth problem - one of the most difficult - during the final 10 minutes. It is notable that the team also solved what was deemed the most difficult problem over 36 other teams (including some of the Ivies) who produced incorrect solutions.

Both YWCC teams observed that they may have been at a slight disadvantage over other teams who brought textbooks to expedite their problem solving. Some universities also went as far as teaching competitive coding classes led by professionals and faculty exclusively for the purpose of participating in ICPC.

This year, the NJIT team dedicated themselves to practicing for 50 minutes at a weekly meeting starting in the fall 2022 semester. Nguyen picked out quality practice problems and explained his thought process to his teammates when solving them.

Nguyen said that ranking among the best universities in the region has inspired the members to practice more and train with harder problems. They will also participate in practice competitions with other universities and professionals in advance of attending next year’s New York Region event at Columbia University in October. The Tigers are especially hungry for a second shot at raising their ranking and placing among one of the four regional teams that will go on to the nationals.

While participating in ICPC may have been a first for this particular student team, NJIT is not new to the competition, and even hosted the regional competition in 2019.

The Programming Club team is actively seeking to build its membership, and Nguyen is planning on doing more student recruitment by promoting the career advantages of competitive programming. “Technical interviews for jobs and internships get easier when you can do competitive programming well. [It] is in demand, especially for quantitative developers. They develop models for trading stocks, and start at about $100 an hour,” he said.

Considering the tough competition and lack of a professional coach, Professor Jim Geller, chair of the department of data science, who is the club’s advisor said, “Given that they were competing against Ivy League quality schools with no professional instructor to practice with them, they achieved their goal of placing in the top half, and that is a very respectable showing.”

Geller also had one humorous observation: “The organization uses a grading system to show live rankings. On Sunday, the software crashed and the chief judge was furiously debugging it while we were all waiting to see who the winner was! He was still debugging when I left.”

In the high stakes’ world of technology, challenges come with the job. How you face them determines the future.

Click https://discord.com/invite/46JeWuQ to find out more about joining Ying Wu’s Programming Team.