A Taxonomy of Algorithms used in the ACM Programming Competition Douglas Hobson Supervisor: A.J. Ebden

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.

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

Resources  “Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing” by David Harel  Top Coder - practice and technique, algorithms etc  USACO – more of the same  ACM Digital Library

 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

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

Sample Problem

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

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.

Are there any questions?  Any comments or suggestions are also welcome