Science Atlantic (formerly APICS) Programming Competition

Background

The Science AtlanticProgramming competition is a preliminary contest for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), an international, multi-tier, team-based competition. ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society (www.acm.org).

The contest involves a global network of universities hosting regional competitions that advance teams to the ACM-ICPC World Finals. Tens of thousands of students and faculty at almost 2,000 universities from over 80 countries compete each year. The contest fosters creativity, teamwork, and innovation in building new software programs, and enables students to test their ability to perform under pressure.

Most students on teams in the world finals get very good scholarship and graduate school opportunities. ACM-ICPC is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest in the world.

How it works in Atlantic Canada

1. Science Atlantic hosts a sub-regional contest in October. Approximately 20 teams from Atlantic universities participate each year. Link to the conference website.
2. Teams are always three students (no spares, no substitutions, all with five or less years of university education).
3. The best two teams from the Science Atlantic programming competition (sometimes three) are invited to the North American Northeast Regional Contest.
4. The best team from the North American Northeast Regional Contest (sometimes the second best as well) is invited to the World Finals. The number of teams that advance to the world finals is dependent on the size of the region and number of teams with respect to other regions; regions with more participating teams are allowed to advance more teams.

At the regional level, winning teams compete with world renowned universities; both Harvard and MIT are in our region, and the only guaranteed advancement is to surpass both teams. However, SMU and UNB have managed to do this in the past five years.

2011 Competition

This year's regional competition will be held at St. Francis Xavier University on Friday October 14th. Teams must be registered by October 7th.

Anyone interested in participating should contact Hazel Webb hwebb@unb.ca as soon as possible. Starting on Monday, September 19th, we will have weekly training meetings. Examples of questions from previous World Finals competitions can be found here.