Any Postechian is able to enter the contest, and 17 teams signed up to compete this year, which is the highest number of participants to date. The most common languages used in the competition were C++ and Java, though C++ was predominant as it is taught at POSTECH. Due to the characteristics of the contest, the members of the programming club POSCAT accounted for the majority of the contestants.
Although it was a successful event, there was a fly in the ointment in the technical setting of the contest. Jeon Junho, the head of academics and scholarships of the Computer Science and Engineering Department who organized the event complained that “the computers were very outdated and slow. It took a long time to pre-install solution checkers and caused inconveniences during the contest.” While the students themselves organize the events for the sake of learning, the school at least should provide conditions for them to excel.
Every contestant is allowed to bring any source of reference in print, but no electronic devices to help them are permitted. The contest started at 1:00 PM and lasted until 7:00 PM, and each team had to solve nine problems during six hours. They worked on the computers in room 501 of the Tae-Joon Park Digital Library, and submitted their solutions using the pre-installed solution checker. The scoring was by the number of problems solved, and then the total amount of time it took to solve each problem if there were any tie. When a solution was wrong, an additional 20 minutes was automatically added to the team’s total time as penalty.
The problems used in the contest were referenced from the previous Associations for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contests. They were scrutinized and selected by three judges, and then approved by a professor. The winner of this year’s contest was Kim Yeongseok (CSE 08), having solved seven problems all by himself.
