First Place
Nov 9, 01:19 AM by Eric Allen
A couple of weeks ago my research advisor for my open source project encouraged us to enter a programming competition sponsored by several groups at RPI. I figured it would be a interesting way to spend a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, and hey, I might just win an iPod touch!
As it turned out, I won a $100 Amazon gift certificate, an 8GB iPod Touch, and an interview with Bloomberg! Not bad for three hours of effort. Oh, and I got a free T-shirt, too. There were eight problems, and I was one of two people who solved four of them in the three-hour period. I believe I was the only one using Java who placed in the top five, and I would argue that my choice of language is what gave me an edge. We got to choose between C, C++, and Java (I know, terrible choices), and I was by far most comfortable in Java. The big advantage came in the libraries, though. I had set operations baked in, didn’t have to waste much effort parsing input, and had full OO at my disposal. I guess my real-world experience helped, too.
So where do I go from here? I’m sort of thinking about trying out TopCoder now that I’ve shown that I can solve these kinds of problems pretty well. On the other hand, I still like building stuff better. Back to coding on real problems!
