QLD Team Wins ACS National University Programming Competition

The winning team, called Potestas, (which is Latin for Power), completed all seven programming problems with an hour to spare, just a few minutes ahead of a team from the University of Melbourne.

The competition was staged on Saturday 27th July at three locations in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. Thirteen teams, including one from Tasmania, participated at RMIT in Melbourne, 10 teams competed at UTS in Sydney and two Queensland teams took part at QUT.

Queensland Coordinator and Director of the ACS Professional Development Board, Alan Underwood said Potestas, which comprised Ben Burton, Jason Wu and Darius Davis, brought considerable experience and intelligence into the competition.

"Two of the students represented Australia as schoolboys in the ACS team that travelled to the SEARCC International Programming Competition, in fact, Ben Burton competed three years running. In addition, all three team members represented Australia in the renowned ACM Competition last year, placing sixth in the world.

"Potestas worked very well as a team. They were highly organised, had a sound strategy, and approached the problems in a polished manner."

"We were delighted with the very high standard of this year's competitors," said Contest Director, George Fernandez.

"It's the first time a team has managed to solve all of the problems. In fact this year there were three groups which achieved that status, including one from RMIT comprising only two programmers."

Second prize was awarded to The Melbourne Trio comprising John Fitzgerald, Andrew Rogers and Lawrence Ip from the University of Melbourne, while honourable mention was made of NFI, the two person team from RMIT.

Competitors had the choice of working in either C or Pascal with Borland's Turbo C and Turbo Pascal used as compilers. Teams were ranked on the number of problems solved with ties determined by the total times taken to solve the problems.

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