At its best, computer science is an exciting blend of programming, mathematics, and problem solving. This course will introduce an interesting variety of subjects in programming, algorithms, and discrete mathematics though puzzles and problems which have appeared in the International ACM Programming Contest and similar venues.

The prerequisites for this course will be a course in data structures or consent of the instructor. I hope to get a mix of students from sophomores to seniors.

This course is based on the book Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual by Steven S. Skiena and Miguel A. Revilla, Springer-Verlag, New York, 2003.

Stony Brook teams have a good history of ACM ICPC activity, winning the Greater New York Regional contest to reach the World Finals in 2006 and 2009.

Course Documents

• Course syllabus with lecture schedule
• Homework Assignment Schedule
• The grading of class assignments will be done by the www.programming-challenges.com robot judge. Students are urged immediately to go the site and register (look to the upper right of the second page) and then look for our course section (HKUST Spring 2009) on this site.
• Problems which work on UVA but not www.programming-challenges.com are presented here.
• Our backup judge will be the Univ. de Valladolid robot judge http://icpcres.ecs.baylor.edu/onlinejudge/. Students are also urged to go the site and register as a new member (use your real name). All class assignments will be testable via both judging sites.
• The complete programs from the book (in C) are available for download!
• On-line lecture notes (in both pdf and html) with full audio are available for the current version of the course.
• An interesting symposium on Perspectives on Computer Science Competitions for (High School) Students was held at Schloss Dagstuhl, January 22-27, 2006. Papers on several aspects of programming contests are available at this site.
• I was the featured presenter at the TopCoder Collegiate Challenge Finals, March 10-11, 2005, at the Marriott hotel in Santa Clara, CA. Watch/listen to my presentation in four parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. Also see my reactions to the event.

  Finally, see Jennifer Jacobson's article about the event: Code Warriors: Young computer programmers battle for fame, money, and the love of algorithms , which appear in the Chronicle of Higher Education, April 8, 2005.

• Examples of ugly C code generated in student solutions.
• A good article on preparing for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is here.
• BitWISE is a 12-hour internet-based algorithm-intensive programming contest sponsored by IIT Kharagpur. This year's contest will be held on February 10, 2009. Maybe we can get up a team?
• The 24-hour International Online Programming Contest (IOPC) is organized every year as a part of TECHKRITI - the annual Science and Technology festival of Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur , India. This year's festival runs February 12-15, 2009.

  Another 24-hour programming contest is run by Budapest University of Technology and Economics and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and has an associated book!

• The USA Computing Olympiad for high school students also has an on-line training course. The US team competes in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI).
• Earn money for participating in programming contests from topcoder.com! See a nice TopCoder-oriented review of Programming Challenges.
• Other online judges / programming contests include the Ural State University judge, the Internet Problem Solving Contest, and the Peking University JudgeOnline.
• A similiar course is taught each Fall at Duke University.
• Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls site has lots of interesting information about algorithmic programming.
• See our photo gallery of ACM programming teams posed with the book.
• See book reviews for Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual
• The books is now available in Korean and Polish translations, with Russian to come!

Join the Stony Brook Computer Science Society!