You thought my problems were hard?

**ndogg** · 03-24-2002, 05:01 PM

If you thought these were hard to solve in five hours (and note, we made these problems for high schoolers), check these out from the 2002 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. *Those problems are from the finals. *Some college in Shanghai (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) took first place, with MIT in second, University of Waterloo in third, Tsinghua University in fourth, and Stanford University in fifth. *Congrats to them. *My University (with me on the team) took fifth within our region.

03-24-2002, 05:25 PM

I heard that languages were limited to Java, C, C++ and another language (can't remember which). That's too bad, since maybe Perl/Python or functional languages could've been useful.

**ndogg** · 03-24-2002, 11:04 PM

I heard that languages were limited to Java, C, C++ and another language (can't remember which). *That's too bad, since maybe Perl/Python or functional languages could've been useful.

There's a lot of math involved in many of the ACM problems, but they're not all math related, just a lot of them. So really, it doesn't matter that much. Not too many students know Perl, Python, Fortran, etc. anyway, so it probably would not make a difference. Although it would be nice if they allowed functional programming languages (e.g. Scheme, LISP, etc.)