The fourth ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in the Southern African region took place on 5 October 2002. Seven universities took part at three locations namely: Pretoria, Cape Town and Grahamstown.
The top four teams managed to complete 5 problems each. This meant that the ranking of the teams was determined by the time taken to complete the problems. One team solved 4 problems. Three teams solved 3 problems, followed by 11 teams solving 2 problems and 9 teams solving 1.
Special thanks to Donald Cook and Bradley Klinkradt for
organising and running the Cape Town and Grahamstown
sites respectively. Also thank you to all their staff.
A word from the Site Manager of Cape Town - Donald Cook:
Well at last the Teddyborgs (Bruce Merry, Carl Hultquist and Neil
Olver, made it. They have tried so valiantly over the past two
years and were always trumped by Wits (Paul Cook and his team.)
So the system works.
The Cape Town Regional got off on a good footing at 0900. Only 1
team failed to report to the contest site. There were 42
computers available to 18 teams - teams were thus able to move to
a new machine in the case of a crash. Thankfully this did not
occur. The marking was done in a second lab about 25 meters
away. A white board was used as a back up system to record
incoming submissions and to record the outcomes for each
submission. At the same time a spreadsheet was updated to
reflect the state of the board.
The 3 helpers that were expected from Stellenbosch did not
arrive, so we press-ganged two staff members, James Gain and Anet
Potgieter to help with the task of managing the marking and
attending to the student queries in the Lab. The coach of the
Stellenbosch team Jacques Eloff was roped in to help with the
marking.
We had 2 other people marking (Daniel Acton & Nick Pinto) and 1
person (Chad Botha) running the spreadsheet and keeping track of
the incoming submissions.
Things went well for the first 3 hours and then the wheels cam
off the mail sever. From what we can tell a rogue process caused
the server to wait too long before handling mail (10 - 15 minutes
delay. It was so bad that we thought the server had crashed.
This carried on until 1 o'clock by which time things sorted
themselves out and got back to normal. We attempted to provide
an alternative through a submission directory with permissions
set to read only for the marking team but by the time this was
sorted the server sorted itself out.
I allowed 30 minutes extra time, to cope with this, but very few
correct questions were submitted in this time.
At 14.30 Richard Vernon from IBM (who could not attend lunch)
talked to the students about IBM's research and other aspects of
the IBM "machine". The students were very appreciative and by
3pm were on their way to the Prima Piatii in Constantia Village
where they enjoyed a well earned 'Lunch'
As a result of the "crashed" mail server the marking and
recording got a little behind but by 3:10pm.
The regional placing was:
Last, but not least, congratulations to all the teams ;-)
Linda Marshall
Regional Contest Director - South Africa
22 October 2002