A Taxonomy of Algorithms used in the ACM Programming Competition

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A Taxonomy of Algorithms used in the ACM
Programming Competition

• Douglas Hobson
• Supervisor A.J. Ebden

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Project Specification

• The hypothesis is that the problems each year in
  the ACM Programming Competition have been drawn
  from the same set of algorithms
• I will attempt derive all of or part of this set
  of algorithms
• Solve as many of the problems as possible
• Derive a classification of the algorithms.

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Background

• Every year students from RU take part in the ACM
  Programming Competition

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Resources

• Algorithmics The Spirit of Computing by David
  Harel
• Top Coder - practice and technique, algorithms
  etc
• USACO more of the same
• ACM Digital Library

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• Local and International ACM Programming
  Competition websites
• Both have many problem sets and statistics about
  the competition
• They have the problem sets that I will be looking
  at

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Proposed Timeline
Analyse all ACM problems from the last 6 years. This will be done to try and find patterns and similarities among the problems 1 month
Start formulating and verifying algorithms.This will be done in conjunction with other steps 1 month
Program solutions to selected problems in C, C or Java in order to validate/verify the algorithm type/suitability of algorithm 4 months
Analyse results of programming attempts 2-3 weeks
Write up the project 1 month
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Sample Problem
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Deliverables

• List of algorithms appearing in the ACM
  Programming Competition
• Their frequency of appearance
• Level of difficulty for humans and machines.

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Possible Extensions

• Tutorial could be developed on how to approach
  the ACM Programming Competition
• Method of ranking algorithms for their level of
  difficulty for humans
• Analyse and formulate algorithms from the board
  game Go.
• Classification of all algorithms, not just ACM
  AI, chess, video games, sorting, searching etc.

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Are there any questions?

• Any comments or suggestions are also welcome