Programming Puzzles & Competitions

This course is intended to prepare students for the ACM ICPC. We will study and design solutions to problems from previous ACM contests (both ICPC and FSU), as well as other puzzle-like problems not necessarily from a specific contest. We will also run some practice contests for students in the class, using the Computer Science Majors Lab.

Grading for this course is on an S/U basis. Grades will be based primarily on attendance and participation.

The web pages for this course will evolve throughout the term.

Most of the materials for this course may be found at Daniel Rosenthal's web page for the course.

Additional Powerpoint slides and examples:

• Intro. to graphs, Floyd-Warshall algorithm. (3/20/2009)
• Intro. to flow problems, Ford-Fulkerson algorithm. (3/27/2009)
• "Tunnels" problem - an attempted example application of min-cut algorithm. Unfortunately, it is not correct. Thanks to Bryce Sandlund for pointing out that I failed to take into account the option of preemptively blowing up tunnels, without trapping the spy (yet), in order to direct him to an area where he can be trapped easily.
• A problem from the spring 2009 FSU ACM programming competition - an application of Dijkstra's algorithm