2009 BJU Programming Contest

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I had the privilege of being one of the alumni-judges at the annual Bob Jones University Computer Science departments programming contest. This was the first time I’ve participated in this type of contest and I found it very interesting. The CS department had a fairly slick harness for executing the contest and supporting the judging in multiple languages and multiple platforms. As with anything of this nature, there were a few bumps in the road, but nothing of any consequence.

The contest turned out wonderfully… we  had around 35 contestants (I lost count because we overflowed the one room and had to use a different room). There were 10 problems of various difficulties to be solved in a 3-hour time window. The contestants could solve the problems in any order, and could choose both their platform (Windows/Linux) and their language (C#, Java, Python, C++, Ruby). To my surprise, many of the contestants switched between languages rather than using just one as I would have expected. Every contestant solved at least one problem properly and all of the problems were solved by at least one person. The distribution of problems solved was pretty balanced as well.

As a judge, my job was to monitor the queue for submitted answers, run the submissions through the test harness and reply on the results back to the contestant. I was a bit amazed (though I shouldn’t have been) at the wide variety of coding styles and levels of verbosity to solve the same problems. The contestants could also submit questions to the judges, and the favorite for the day was “can I leave and not come back?”.

I’d like to congratulate the winners and all of the contestants for a fine job and look forward to participating in next year’s event.