At its best, computer science is an exciting blend of programming, mathematics, and problem solving. This course will introduce an interesting variety of subjects in programming, algorithms, and discrete mathematics though puzzles and problems which have appeared in the International ACM Programming Contest and similar venues.

The prerequisites for this course will be a course in data structures (CSE 214 or equivalent) or consent of the instructor. I hope to get a mix of students from sophomores to seniors.

ACM Programming contest activity is sponsored by a grant from Salomon Smith Barney

The course Final Exam will be held Thursday, May 10, 2001 from 10:30AM to 1:45PM. Meet at my office (1411 Computer Science) to get the problems. The teams are:

• Cheng, Gorbowitz, Pan
• Chan Lee, Habek
• Macenzie, Reimer, Schwartz
• Fox, Pop, Lein

Course Documents

• Course syllabus
• Lecture Schedule
• Homework Assignment Schedule
• The grading of class assignments will be done by the robot judge of the Univ. de Valladolid, Spain ACM Problem Set Archive. Students are urged immediately to go the site and register as a new member (use your real name). All class assignments will be problems from this site which have a robot judge.
• Course notes for week 1, 2, including examples of C language string IO using getchar, gets, and scanf, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 8, 9, 10 (see an alternate approach to dynamic programming), 11, 12, and 13
• Examples of ugly C code generated in student solutions.
• Student rankings on the Univ. de Valladolid site.
• Earn money for participating in programming contests from topcoder.com!
• A good article on preparing for the ACM contest is here.
• The USA Computing Olympiad also has an on-line training course.
• A similiar course is taught each Fall at Duke University.
• Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls

Join the Stony Brook Computer Science Society!