By Chris Wolf
By Chris Wolf
Recently, RCC hosted an International Collegiate Programming contest for aspiring code crunchers. The event was sponsored by IBM and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The search engine colossus, Google, provided the monetary awards to the winners, which was $5000 in total. Winners selected from regional contests on six continents get to advance to the ACM Programming Contest World Finals in Tokyo, to compete for scholarships, and most importantly, bragging rights.
A standard team for this event consists of three participants, two of which must be an undergraduate, and one, which must be a graduate student from the same school. Students who participated in two world finals or five regional contests are not allowed to compete again. The contest consisted of solutions written in various programming languages such as C++ and JAVA using the open source GNU/Linux operating system, and lasted over five demanding hours.
Over 70 teams consisting of 200 students from Universities and Colleges throughout Southern California flocked to the event. The team names were as witty and diverse as the competitors, including “RCC::SortByXOR,” “RCC::IOException” and less technological themed names such as UCR’s “You see are” and “UC ARGHHH.”
RCC’s team, consisting of Erick Marquez, Shendy Kurnia, and Kenneth Varela beat out many rival teams to grab the “Top College” award in the community college category and won a $300 prize per member, awarded by Google.
A representative from IBM noted that throughout all his travels to major competitions, RCC hosted one of the smoothest and most professional event bar none. Recognizing that in the near future, mainframe system administrators will begin retirement, IBM Extreme Blue hurriedly gathered resumes for internships and possible full.- time employment. Google presented its “Summer of fun” programming competition that will make use of Google Maps and its open source API (Application Programming Interface).