The University of Nevada, Reno student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, took sixth place at the regional programming competition held on October 26th. The team competed against more than 70 collegiate programing teams.

The competition pitted teams of three against fellow programmers and against the clock, giving them five hours to solve 10 programming questions. Teams try to solve as many problems as they can as quickly as possible, with incorrect solutions resulting in a time penalty.

The University's team competed in the Rocky Mountain region, which included more than 70 teams at three sites: the University of Alberta, the University of Arizona and Brigham Young University.

Questions asked students to develop solutions to problems such as efficiently displaying advertising for a fictitious social networking company or calculating winnings from a hypothetical fast food prize giveaway.

The University's team answered five questions correctly and placed first at the Brigham Young University site. The winning team answered seven questions correctly.

"The skills you must acquire to do well in programming competitions are the same skills that many competitive companies check for in their technical interviews," said computer science and engineering student Jared Rhizor, who is also the club officer in charge of programming competitions. "It looks great on a resume."

In addition to competing in regional programming competitions, ACM is hosting a local programming contest this spring.

"It's a much shorter, individual competition split into divisions based on the computer science classes taken by each competitor," said Rhizor. "Additionally, we're having weekly training sessions for students interested in the regional ACM programming competition, where we cover various computer science topics used in the regional competitions."

For more information about getting involved with ACM, please contact acm@cse.unr.edu.