KS
Kyle Singer
  • Rock Hill, MO

Kyle Singer of Webster Groves Takes Second Place at Regional Computer Programming Contest

2011 Nov 8

Using a computer to multiply two large numbers may not sound terribly challenging. But what if you could not use the calculator application - and you were required to show your work like an elementary school student learning multiplication?

This is one of the programming challenges that Kyle Singer of Webster Groves, a graduate of Webster Groves High School, successfully tackled at the Association for Computing Machinery regional programming competition on Saturday, November 5. Singer competed on a team with two other computer science majors, and UE placed second of 14 collegiate teams that competed at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky.

"Kyle Singer performed well at this annual competition, which requires logic, strategy, precision, and mental endurance," said Don Roberts, the team's advisor and a UE associate professor of computer science. "I'm proud of his creativity and teamwork in tackling the problems, and I was impressed with his ability to stay focused under pressure."

The annual programming contest pits teams of three university students against eight complex problems with a five-hour deadline. Huddled around a single computer, competitors race against the clock to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds, and build software systems that solve the problems.

UE's team solved three problems to finish 55th out of 141 teams competing at sites throughout the Mid-Central region, which included students from Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee. The top three teams in the regional competition will advance to the world finals in Warsaw, Poland, in May 2012.

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is sponsored by IBM and operates under the auspices of ACM with its headquarters at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Tens of thousands of students and faculty from more than 1,800 universities compete in the contest, representing nearly 90 countries and six continents.