Stony Brook teams finished 5th, 10th and 16th among 52 teams at the ACM ICPC Greater New York Regional Programming Contest held at Rutgers University on October 24, 2010.
Princeton teams finished first and second in a contest dominated by parsing and simulation problems. These stress precision and detail more than clever reasoning, making the contest a tough slog for the students. Stony Brook teams train for and traditionally perform better on sophisticated algorithmic problems.
The Stony Brook 1 graduate student team of Aniruddha Laud, Pritam Damania and Nicolo John Davis were in the hunt, finishing a strong fifth place, behind four Ivy league graduate student teams. They solved seven problems, and would have been candidates to go to the finals had any of their four unsuccessful submissions to Problem F passed the judge.
The undergraduate student Stony Brook 2 team of Leif Walsh, Jiayu Zhang, and Tony Zheng overcame a slow start to muscle their way into the top ten. Leif is a veteran of Stony Brook's 2008 championship team that went to Stockholm.
The freshman/sophmore team of Vincent Tsuei, Kevin Sackel, and Chao Xu charged out of the gate with three problems in the first hour and four within the first 92 minutes -- at which point they comfortably lead all the Stony Brook teams. But they got off only one more (incorrect) submission in the remaining three and a half hours, sliding down to 16th place. They finished second among all freshman/sophmore teams, which bodes very well for next year.
Stony Brook teams did accrue a few bragging rights in the contest, as the only non-Ivy School in the top ten. All three Stony Brook teams finished ahead of each of the six teams sent by NYU. Finally, Stony Brook had the most extensive coach staff of any school at the contest, with Charles Ward and Yanquing Chen (who reached the World Finals for Peking University in 2008) assisting faculty advisor Steven Skiena in his labors.
Stony Brook Team 1, in action (left to right) Pritam Damania, Aniruddha Laud, and Nicolo John Davis, and with coaching staff.
Stony Brook Team 2: in action (left to right) Leif Walsh, Tony Zheng, and Jaiyu Zhang, and with coaching staff.
Stony Brook Team 3: in action (left to right) Chao Xu, Kevin Sackel, and Vincent Tsuei, and with coaching staff.
Previous years results include: