Student programmers win accolades, Xboxes

By Rory Sa

Computer science majors Abraham Heidedrech and Nick Simi have more than certificates and accolades as proof of their programming skills. They also have Microsoft Xbox video game systems.

Tuesday’s simple ceremony in the foyer of the East Engineering building honored the two seniors and the 29 other students who participated in a programming competition in April that was sponsored by Microsoft.

Participants were given a task, rules and three hours to pull everything together before their work was tested. The winners were announced the day of the competition, though they did not receive their prize within the last month.

Heidedrech described the competition as being laid back. “Went in there, had a couple of problems, it wasn’t really stressful at all,” he said.

Professor Walter Read, who wrote the problems for the contest, described the event as a warm-up for students. “You sit in class, you take notes, you memorize stuff, you solve problems, you turn it in… it’s okay, it’s nice to get an A, but it’s not very exciting,” Read said.

Problems for the competition included calculating the date anywhere from 1000 years ago to 200 years in the future. “Ideally they involve a variety of different techniques,” Read said.

“But getting into a contest—the energy, the little bit of competition—it really gets people stimulated to think more about what they’re doing,” he said.

Fresno State will be hosting the Pacific Northwestern regional competition for the Association for Computer Machinery, pitting Fresno State against the skills of programmers from over 30 Northern California campuses.

Fresno State programmers can also look forward to a robot competition next spring. Read said Microsoft has donated $2,500 toward the competition, in which students will program a robot to do a variety of tasks.

Read said programming a robot was more of a challenge. “Robots have limited memory and fairly limited processing ability, so you have to be a lot more careful about how you write the program,” he said.