On April 21st the students of Zhejiang University won the medal in ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest for the first time. Team Zodiac, composed of Dong Xiao, Hang Hang, Master from College of Computer Science and Zejun Wu, Bachelor from College of Science, won the silver medal with the 6th place.
ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (abbreviated as ACM-ICPC or just ICPC) is an annual multi-tiered computer programming competition among the universities of the world and operates under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). During contest, the teams are given 5 hours to solve between 8 and 11 programming problems (with 8 typical for regionals and 10 for finals). They must submit solutions as programs in C, C++, or Java. Programs are then run on test data. If a program fails to give a correct answer, the team is notified about that and they can submit another program. The contest consists of several stages. Many universities hold local contests to determine participants at the regional level. Then, universities compete in Regional contests. Winners of Regional contests advance to the ACM-ICPC World Finals. Compared to other programming contests (for example, International Olympiad in Informatics), the ICPC is characterized by a large number of problems (8 or more problems in just 5 hours). Another feature is that each team can use only one computer, although teams have three students. This makes the time pressure even greater. Good teamwork and ability to withstand pressure is needed to win. The World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, ACM-ICPC World Finals, is the final round of competition. Over its history it has become a 4-day event held in the finest venues world-wide. [UPE] recognizes all of the regional champions at the event. Recent World Champion teams have been recognized by their country's head of state and at the annual ACM Awards Ceremony.
It is the 7th time that the students of Zhejiang University have entered the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals since 2003. The best score of the previous 6 competitions was the 13th place, but the participants never gained a medal before. Dong Xiao said, the team is named after Zodiac, which means they were determined to win the top 12 place to get a medal. The 2009 ACM-ICPC World Finals were held in Stockholm, Sweden, April 18-22. There were 100 teams from over 200 regional sites to competing for the World Championship. And the students of Zhejiang University fulfilled their dreams there.
It is said that Zhejiang University established the Programming Contest Practice Base to undertake the different levels of student programming contest. The Base is an autonomous student organization where students can design the system, manage the project, set the question and run the organization by themselves. The Base set up the Online Judgment System and Web ACM of Zhejiang University (abbreviated as ZOJ) on March 2002. Now the web site has been running steadily for 7 years and the PV is nearly 800,000, so it becomes the one of the domestic online item pools.