CSE Hosts ACM Collegiate Programming Contest (Hong Kong) 2019

The 29th Annual ACM Collegiate Programming Contest (Hong Kong) was held at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology campus on 22 June 2019 (Saturday) and undergraduate students from local tertiary institutions tested their skills against each other that day. This year, there are 33 teams from Hong Kong and Macau joined the local contest at HKUST.

Every year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) sponsors regional and international collegiate programming contests. They have divided the world into 16 regions and each region has a regional contest, with the top two or three teams in each region going on to the international contest.

Since 1991, the ACM Hong Kong Chapter has been organizing a local contest in Hong Kong, modeling after the ACM contests in terms of objectives, format, and style. This year, teams have been invited from the tertiary institutions in Hong Kong and Macau: Each department of a participating institution can nominate a maximum of two regular teams and a maximum of four regular and observing teams in total to take part in the contest.

During the contest, students would form teams of 3 and would compete against the clock. The software used was Microsoft Windows 10 (1809) with Dev C++ 5.7.1, Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 and Oracle JDK 1.8.0. Each team was given 8 programming problems and they would try to write programs to solve many of the problems as possible within the allocated time, which was 4 hours. The team that could correctly solve the most problems would win the competition. If there are multiple teams solving the same number of problems, the team that solved the fastest wins. This competition also shows that expertise in debugging and quick-and-dirty hacking is more valuable than rigid software engineering technologies in such kinds of environments.

Learn more about ACM-HK Programming Contest 2019.

Some snapshots of the event: