On Saturday March 28th, thirty-six Michigan Tech students took part in the 16th Annual NMU Invitational Programming Contest. The students sent a record number of 13 teams of up to three students to compete against 18 other teams from Northern Michigan University, Lake Superior State University, Algoma University, and The College of St. Scholastica (Duluth, MN). Michigan Tech also sponsored the first ever high school teams to compete in the NMU Invitational; two teams comprised of students who participate in the Copper Country Programmers.
Teams worked for five hours on six programming problems. The final ranking is determined by the number of problems that are completed correctly with ties broken by the number of minutes taken to solve the problems.
The Michigan Tech team of Mitch Davis, Hurricane Hamilton, and Chad Meyers placed first solving five of the six problems. Second place went to the team of Corey Bilski, Chris Wallis, and Eric Zimmer solving 4 problems. Third place went to the team of Mike Grimes, Brendan Kerrigan, and John Novak.
The strong overall performance of the teams resulted in a 1st place school ranking for Michigan Tech. The continued success of Michigan Tech teams at the NMU and ACM programming competitions has benefited greatly over the years from Prof. David Poplawski’s direction and creation of an elective course on competitive programming (CS1090).
Additional information on the programming competition, rules, and full results are available at: http://philos.nmu.edu/NMUCONTEST16/