About the Programming Team
Here you'll find some info about the team itself.
Programming Contests
These are what we live for. For programming contests
our team is divided up into smaller teams of no more than
3 people. Each of those teams are given a set of problems
to solve. A solution is a written program (usually in C/C++ or
Pascal. Java and perl are used for some contests) that solves
the problem. The team with the most correct solutions in
the least amount of time wins.
Programming contests are the closest things geeks have to
sports competitions. Instead of running around after a ball,
we get to sit behind a computer (something we'll do anyway),
and apply our programming abilities to beat up on the competition.
Benefits from the team
One of the things participants get out of the team is practice
working in groups in time-pressured situations. It's an excellant
oppurtunity to gain experience in those situations before you get
to the work place.
The problems reinforce what you learn from classes.
Stuff from data structures, algorithms, operating systems, etc
all come into play for various problems. It's one thing to
see an algorithm in class, it's quite another to be able
to apply it. The programming team gives you that oppurtunity.
While you get a lot from classes, there are alot of things
you may not touch upon. The problems we do gives you oppurtunity
to learn new programming techniques and algorithms
you may not have seen before.
Programming Problems
Solving problems is at the heart of what we do. So what
problems do we work on? The problems can be anything, from
checking if 3 numbers are valid quantum numbers, to writing
a left-recursive decent parser. The problems usually
do not require massive amounts of code (in fact, if you're
writing a lot of code, then you're probably doing the
problem wrong.) The problems do not involve things like
writing a windows application, etc.
If you're curious, there's a
programming problems page with various problems I"ve written.
A copy of my solution and the input and output that I used
to judge solutions are there as well.
Ben Breech
breech@cis.udel.edu