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November 20, 2008| 
Recap on Game Day
Game Day
The ACM sponsored Game Day was held yesterday (Tuesday, November 18, 2008), in Kochoff Hall in the University Center. More than two hundred people attended the event, which ran from 11:00 a. m. until 5:00 p.m. ACM provided snacks and drinks, and several people brought in consoles and games. We would like to extend many thanks to Cardi DeMonaco, Vince Shaw, Tony Wesley, Trevor Tabaka, Pablo Garcia, and the Game Club for letting us use their systems. We look forward to making this a recurring event.
Recap on Regional Programming Competition
Game Day
The teams from the University of Michigan-Dearborn placed 50th and 81st place out of 125 teams in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition held in Ann Arbor on November 1. Congratulations to the team members Garegin Avagyan, Cale Colony, Luke Duncan, Andrew Hagen, Scott Hoffman, Trevor Tabaka, assistant (actual coach in all but title) coach Dennis Matveyev and coach Professor Elenbogen.
Visit acm.ashland.edu for the actual problems from the contest to try on your own.
UMD Programming Competition on December 3
Join us for the fun and for the challenge of a real programming contest conducted at school for our own students. The purpose of this contest is to start up a contest tradition at UMD, to have fun, to experience the challenges that programming contests bring.
We are aiming the contest towards students who’ve taken CIS 150, 200 or above, so the difficulty should be relatively straightforward. Nevertheless it’s a contest, so expect to be challenged!
The contest is on December 3rd in lab CIS 139. Tentative schedule:
5pm – snacks, practice and demonstration sessions, Q&A session
6pm – real contest begins
9pm – contest ends, food is given out
9:30pm – winners are announced.
The contest will be run by the rules of established ACM regional contests with some modifications. That is, there are 5 problems to be solved in a 3 hours period. You can use C, C++ or Java. Problems are judged automatically by comparing the judge’s answers to the answers given by your program. They have to match exactly character by character to be counted as a solution. You will not be judged on the written style of your program or any comments. The only thing that will matter for the contest is if your program gives the right answers and if it works fast enough for all the test cases. The judges want to have everybody solve at least one problem but have nobody solve all 5 problems.
Prizes are: $50 first place, $30 second place and $20 third place. There will also be other non-monetary prizes and honorable mentions. While the contest is serious in its core, we intend to make it a fun event with fun and interesting problems to solve.
If you are interested in attending the event, but do not want to participate in the programming competition, we have many other things you can help with. Please contact Dennis Matveyev at dennismv@umd.umich.edu or Scott Hoffman at sehoffma@umd.umich.edu if you want to help!
Engineering Organizations Council update
Pablo attended the first meeting of the Engineering Organizations Council that was held on November 13. This new council is composed of the officers of the various engineering organizations on campus. The dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science would like better coordination between engineering organizations. The EOC will publish monthly calendars listing all the engineering-related events, as well as provide a TV in the ELB and/or UC for announcements. We will send a representative to the next meeting on December 4.
Elections for next semester
For the winter 2009 semester, Treasurer and Secretary positions will be available. If you are interested in running for one of these positions, please contact Cardi DeMonaco at cdemonac@umd.umich.edu or 586.744.3864 as soon as possible. The deadline for declaring your intention to run is December 1.
We will hold elections for these positions at the next regular meeting on December 3.
New brochures
We have completed the “Free Software Guide for College Students” brochure and passed out copies at the Game Day event. We still have a lot of copies left and will work on distributing them around campus.
We discussed ideas for other brochures, including how to check multiple email accounts with one application, and tips for optimizing your Windows installation. We also discussed the option of creating a Help section on ACM website to go along with the brochures.
T-shirts (see if any new people have ideas)
Since nobody has submitted any ideas for ACM t-shirts, we talked about what would persuade people to buy an ACM t-shirt and whether we should choose quantity over quality or quality over quantity.
Miscellaneous
Pablo reported that the chapter has approximately $1200 in its account, in addition to the $1500 allocated by the SOAC each year.
Dr. Elenbogen announced that ACM will sponsor a contest for UM-D students to submit problems for the CECS High School Programming Competition. First prize $50, second place $25. You can submit problems to Dr. Elenbogen from now until March 1.
The next meeting will be held on Wednesday, December 3, 2008 at 10:30 a.m. in the CIS Building conference room.
