NJIT Students Compete With Region's Best in Programming Competition
An NJIT team finished in the top third at this year's regional bracket of the International Collegiate Programming Contest, approximately matching last year's result and leaving members with valuable lessons for next year and for their careers beyond.
The contest pitted 70 teams from 24 colleges for a chance to attend the North American edition and ultimately the world finals. This year is the first time the regionals were held here in Newark. There were 10 Highlander teams from the Ying Wu College of Computing that all finished in the top 50% despite elite competition such as Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, and Yale, along with rival Stevens Institute.
The top-finishing NJIT team of Malachi Dube, Jacob Haynie, and Teslim Olunlade called themselves Postfix Notation. That's an insider term for a shorthand method of writing mathematical expressions, better known to professional engineers as Reverse Polish Notation, which was made famous in HP calculators as a tribute to the method's inventor.
Haynie is a junior double major in computer science and computational mathematics who said he chose NJIT because of a scholarship opportunity, the quality of the computer science department and proximity to New York City. He participated in the contest last year too and said this year was easier because of the team's experience and home-field advantage in not having to travel.
"I think next year, given the opportunity, we could possibly do better," Haynie said. Classes in data structures, algorithms, and intensive Linux programming were the most helpful in his preparation. For future competitors, "I would definitely not go in just thinking about the classes you've taken, but do your own studying and research. There were a lot of problems that had to do with computational geometry which we haven't studied in any class."
Haynie said he enjoyed the challenge of being forced to think outside the box. For example, the contest's first problem was somewhat of a trick question, asking students for the best method to see if the first three digits of a seven-digit phone number are 555. Many students including Haynie wrote code to individually examine the first three characters, but the correct answer was a more efficient technique of dividing the number by 10,000 to see if the result is 555 before any decimal points. That kind of approach would speed up a commercial application.
"It was definitely fun," Haynie said. "It seems like it'd be grueling considering it is a 5-hour competition, but it was a blast in my opinion."