imac.jpg

ACM 2005 Results

The Simon's Rock programming team of Fedor Labounko, Michael Haskel and Eric Stratmann, turned in a solid performance at the ACM Regional Finals for Northeast North America, placing fifth. They had earlier placed third in the Northeastern Preliminaries, finishing behind MIT and Harvard. The regional finals were held at Rochester Institute of Technology on Saturday, Nov. 5, and the final standings were:

  1. Massachusets Institute of Technology
  2. Binghamton University
  3. Harvard University
  4. Brown University
  5. Simon's Rock College
  6. Acadia University (Wolfville, N.S.)
  7. Dalhousie University (Halifax)
  8. Concordia University (Montreal)
  9. University of Rochester
  10. Middlebury College
  11. Western New England College
  12. St. Mary's University (Halifax)
The problems were quite difficult and the level of competition was extremely high. Finalists consisted of the top teams from 5 regional preliminary competitions, three in the US and two in Canada. Schools that entered but did not make it to the finals this year included: 
	École de technologie supérieure (University of Quebec)
	Université du Québec en Outaouais
	Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
	McGill University
	Rochester Institute of Technology
	SUNY at Brockport
	Colgate University
	SUNY at Oswego
	Hobart College
	Fredonia College
	Colby College
	Fitchburg State College
	Providence College
	Wellesley College
	University of Massachusets
	Stonehill College
	University of New Brunswick
	University of Prince Edward Island
	Université de Moncton
	Mount Allison University
	Université Laval
	Williams College
	Trinity College
	University of Connecticut
	Southern Connecticut State University
	Worcester Polytechnic Institute
	Central Connecticut State University
	Bryant University
	Plymouth State University
	Siena College
	University of Bridgeport
	Memorial University of New Brunswick
	St. Francis Xavier University
	Clarkson University
Of the finalists, only MIT, Brown and Simon's Rock entered a single team in the competition (MIT chooses their team via an internal competition between around twenty aspiring teams). Most of the schools have large computer science departments -- Rochester Institute of Technology, the host of the finals, has over 2000 students in their program; while Harvard, with whom we had dinner Friday night, has 100+ majors and 20 faculty members in computer science. Middlebury College was the only other "small" school in the finals -- with maybe 30-40 majors and 6 faculty.

Over the last two weekends, faculty from many institutions commented on the superb performance of our team -- and asked me numerous questions about Simon's Rock College. Fedor, Mike and Eric really put us on the ACM map. At the awards ceremony the director of the competition introduced us as Simon Rocks instead of Simon's Rock . . .

ACM is the professional organization of computer scientists, and their annual collegiate programming contest is quite prestigious and has high visibility in the discipline. But the skills and knowledge needed to solve the problems belong to both computer science and mathematics, and teams are often composed of students from both disciplines (two of the three students on the Harvard team, for instance, were mathematics majors).

Fedor, Eric, and Mike

Arrival

 


November 6, 2005