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.

This course is based on the book Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual by Steven S. Skiena and Miguel A. Revilla, Springer-Verlag, New York, 2003.

ACM Programming contest activity at Stony Brook is sponsored by a grant from Salomon Smith Barney. In the 2002 Greater New York Regional, Stony Brook's teams finished 2nd and 5th with 54 teams competing! In the 2003 Greater New York Regional, Stony Brook finished 4th of 60 teams. In the 2004 Greater New York Regional, three of Stony Brook's teams finished in the top 15 positions!

Course Documents

• Course syllabus with lecture schedule (also in pdf and postscript).
• Homework Assignment Schedule
• The Spring 2005 version of the course has been assigned the number ``CSE 393'' instead of my prefered ``CSE 392''. In fact, the course is the same as the one I have offered the last two springs. Be alert to problems arising from confused numbers, such as registration (register for CSE 393) and web address (I like my pages as 392 and won't move them).
• The grading of class assignments will be done by the www.programming-challenges.com robot judge. Students are urged immediately to go the site and register for our course section on this site, Stony Brook -- CSE 393 -- Spring 2005.
• Our backup judge will be the Univ. de Valladolid robot judge http://online-judge.uva.es/. Students are also urged to go the site and register as a new member (use your real name). All class assignments will be testable via both judging sites.
• The complete programs from the book (in C) are available for download!
• On-line lecture notes (in both pdf and html) with full audio are available for the current version of the course.
• Fill out an evaluation form (mid-semester or final) for the course to help me do a better job!
• An interesting symposium on Perspectives on Computer Science Competitions for (High School) Students was held at Schloss Dagstuhl, January 22-27, 2006. Papers on several aspects of programming contests are available at this site.
• I was the featured presenter at the TopCoder Collegiate Challenge Finals, March 10-11, 2005, at the Marriott hotel in Santa Clara, CA. Watch/listen to my presentation in four parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. Also see my reactions to the event.

  Finally, see Jennifer Jacobson's article about the event: Code Warriors: Young computer programmers battle for fame, money, and the love of algorithms , which appear in the Chronicle of Higher Education, April 8, 2005.

• Participate in a web contest (run by Springer-Verlag) promoting Programming Challenges. Win a free copy of The Algorithm Design Manual! See a teaser promoting the contest, which ran until June 1, 2004.
• Old course notes (from the Spring 2001 edition of the course) 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.
• A good article on preparing for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is here.
• BitWISE is a 12-hour internet-based algorithm-intensive programming contest sponsored by IIT Kharagpur. This year's contest will be held on February 13, 2005. Maybe we can get up a team?
• The 24-hour International Online Programming Contest (IOPC) is organized every year as a part of TECHKRITI - the annual Science and Technology festival of Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur , India. This year's contest starts February 20, 2005.

  Another 24-hour programming contest is run by Budapest University of Technology and Economics and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and has an associated book!

• The USA Computing Olympiad for high school students also has an on-line training course. The US team competes in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI).
• Earn money for participating in programming contests from topcoder.com! See a nice TopCoder-oriented review of Programming Challenges.
• Other online judges / programming contests include the Ural State University judge, the Internet Problem Solving Contest, and the Peking University JudgeOnline.
• A similiar course is taught each Fall at Duke University.
• Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls site has lots of interesting information about algorithmic programming.
• See our photo gallery of ACM programming teams posed with the book.
• See book reviews for Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual
• The books is now available in Korean and Polish translations, with Russian to come!

Join the Stony Brook Computer Science Society!