Stony Brook's three programming teams all solved four or more problems and finished in the top half of the field of the 2006 ACM Greater New York Regional Programming contest, held at Nassau County College on October 29, 2006. It is a result disappointing only in light of high expectations following Stony Brook's championship in 2005 regional.
This year's contest featured relatively elementary problems heavily stressing coding speed and precision, instead of the more sophisticated algorithmic problems which have proven the bread-and-butter of previous Stony Brook's teams. This gave many more teams a chance to score (all 58 teams got two or more problems this year, a total achieved by only 32 of the 59 teams in 2005), but amplified the impact of elementary mistakes among the elite teams. Rutgers won the region in dramatic fashion, trailed immediately by seven teams from the Ivy League (three each from Cornell and Princeton, and one from Yale).
The Stony Brook's top team of Mikhail Bautin, Ashish Lohia, and Alex Turner solved 5 problems and finished 16th in the field. They fought back when a spelling mistake left them 42nd after the first problem to rise as high as 6th (after three problems) before being ground down by a series of boundary conditions and problem imprecisions. They were the top Long Island team in the competition.
Stony Brook's most impressive performance came from our freshman-sophomore team of Gaurav Singhal, Tynan Fitzpatrick, and Leif Walsh. They solved 4 problems with no incorrect submissions, and finished 23rd place overall. Finishing third among the 11 freshman-sophomore teams in the competition, they trailed only teams from Yale and Princeton. Their performance augers well for the future, particularly as two of them just joined Stony Brook as freshman two months ago.
Stony Brook's remaining team of Peter Kim, Prateek Saxena, and Chaitanya Patti also solved 4 problems and finished 26th, comfortably ahead of the majority of the 58 team field.
Stony Brook teams with and without official Citigroup umbrellas (thanks Citigroup!).
Team 1: Ashish Lohia, Mikhail Bautin, and Alex Turner
Team 2: Chaitanya Patti, Peter Kim, and Prateek Saxena
Team 3: Tynan Fitzpatrick, Leif Walsh, and Gaurav Singhal
Previous years results include:
The activities of the Stony Brook Programming Teams are sponsored by
a generous grant from Citigroup.
