Problems from the 12th annual ACM programming contest
Lionel E. Deimel · ACM SIGCSE Bulletin · 1988
The 12th Annual ACM Scholastic Programming Contest was held February 24, 1988, in Atlanta, Georgia .Twenty-four team s competed, representing universities and colleges in North America and Europe.At the beginning of the contest, each four-studen t team was given eight problems, for which Pascal solutions were sought .Contestants developed these on Apple Macintosh computers, using Lightspeed Pascal from THINK Technologies Division of Symantec Corporation .Contestants submitted programs for judging whenever they believed them to meet the specifications of the problem statements .Solutions were evaluated by runnin g them against data developed by the contest judges .Contestants did not see the output of the judging process, nor did they get any bu t the sketchiest indications of their programs' failures on the secret data .Teams were permitted to try their programs on the judges ' data as often as they liked, but a penalty was assessed for each incorrect submission .The team from California Institute of Technology won the contest by solving all eight problems in 5 hours 17 minutes .Additional details about the contest may be found in "ACM News" in the May 1988 Communications of the ACM .In this paper, I present the problems used in the 1988 contest, some commentary on those problems, and statistics selected to characterize how well teams performed .This material should be of interest to future programming contest judges and contestants, t o computer science instructors searching for assignments, and to anyone who likes to program and who enjoys a challenge .The ACM contest is administered by a contest group, headed by a director .Collection and evaluation of problems is the responsibility of a chief judge .For the 1988 contest, I was the director, and Gary A .Ford, also of the Software Engineering Institute, wa s chief judge .Other judges contributing to problem selection were Ralph Bisland,