13 December 2013

ANU students take out top spots at programming comp

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Ponys

Several teams of ANU programmers have done quite well at the annual IEEEXtreme programming competition, which is awesome.

Special mention should go to team ’42’, not just for coming 5th but also for drawing inspiration from a much cooler franchise than their peers did.

Three ANU students have taken out first place at the annual IEEEXtreme programming competition, which sees students face off against each other amongst the world’s smartest problem solvers.

IEEEXtreme is a global competition which runs for a full 24 hours as teams of university students compete against each other to complete a series of programming problems. The more difficult the problems they complete, the higher the points they earn. IEEExtreme is held around the world at the same time, each year, on each participating campus.

Six teams from ANU entered the competition with team ‘RainbowDash’ taking out first place nationally and 19th in the global rankings. Team members Teresa Bradbury, Andrew Donnellan and Jonathan Erik Franzi were very pleased with the win.

Despite the challenges faced during the event, the students still had an enjoyable time.

“The challenge of solving algorithm problems quickly and efficiently, and the opportunities for teamwork made IEEEXtreme 2013 a very memorable event,” Franzi says.

“Tessa and Andrew were great teammates, and I hope to compete in a team with them again.

Fellow students from the team ‘TwilightSparkle’, consisting of team members Lewin Hodgman, Robert Offner and Buck Shlegeris came second in Australia and 22nd internationally.

Fifth place was awarded to the team known as ‘42’ who placed 220th internationally. The team members were Wang Donglu, Grigori Ougrinovski and Miranda Zhang.

The teams were supervised by ANU Fellow Uwe Zimmer and Associate Professor Weifa Liang, who were both very proud of the way the teams conducted themselves over the 24 hours.

“It was a pleasure to see our student teams endure an international programming marathon with competence and elegance,” Zimmer says.

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Congratulations to them, some fantastic talent!

Great stuff!

I know Jon Franzi, he’s a very smart young bloke with a big future ahead of him.

Well done to them! Clever things.

And do they all look like Bill Gates before they start the course, or does that just happen?

The article has been corrected to point out that we only came 1st in the Australian rankings – we were still 19th of ~1800 teams worldwide though 🙂

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