April 29, 1996 Dear Team Adviser, Thank you for participating in the Utah High School Programming Contest. We enjoy having the kids here and appreciate your taking time to sponsor them. Enclosed with this letter are complete results of the contest, along with a certificate for each of the students on your team. Please let us know if you find any spelling problems so we can print new ones for them. I promised a few comments on the take-home solutions that we received and the typical errors experienced by teams on the day of the contest. The simulators were truly impressive! You outdid our wildest expectations. Most of the programs were well thought out and functional. Most teams created some sort of a user interface for their CPU simulator. The interfaces ranged from a simple command-line style debugging tool to a brightly colored, multi-window, mouse-driven Graphical User Interface with many advanced capabilities. Provo High submitted the most original GUI; it was not flashy but the whole thing was written in the Smalltium Assembly language and interpreted by the CPU! The team from Meiridian High went even further; they wrote their own Smalltium assembler. Many teams also added new traps to their implementations as well as quite a few example programs. The traps ranged from math functions (sin, cos, sqrt) to color graphics to file I/O and even music synthesis. In short, the results of the take home project were extremely good. As for typical errors, the coin question seemed to cause the most problems. It turned out to be much more difficult than it appeared because students were getting round-off errors that caused their programs to terminate incorrectly. As I mentioned at the awards ceremony, this was hopefully a good lesson to the teachers, as well as the students. Floating point arithmetic is inexact, even for such simple calculations, so it's an important issue to cover in computer science classes. One other question that caused problems for several teams was the one about circles. Some teams didn't correctly handle the case where the circles were tangent to one another, and others didn't detect when one circle was totally inside the other. I didn't receive many questionnaires this year. Please mail or fax yours if you still have it. Your comments are always very helpful. The main problem this year seemed to be errors made by a couple of our judges. My apologies to anyone who was effected by that situation. In particular, the Highland High team was incorrectly judged on a correct solution; they certainly deserved a higher place in the contest. We plan to be fully computerized next year to avoid such embarrassment in the future. Once again, I must acknowledge the assistance of the Student Chapter of the ACM for volunteering to run the contest, and the Department of Computer Science for providing the facility and support staff. Without all of this, we couldn't possibly succeed in such a time-consuming, complex undertaking. Our sponsors are of course very much appreciated. As usual, Unisys was our most generous donor, providing much of the cost of the T-shirts. Prizes and participation gifts were also donated by 3M Health Information Systems, Access Software, Caldera, Domino's Pizza, Evans & Sutherland, Famous Amos Cookies, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Novell (WordPerfect), Pacific HiTech, Pepsi, Sculptured Software, and Shasta. If any of you know of other companies that might be willing to be involved in future years, please let me know. I hope that you found our program for advisors to be interesting and educational. If you have any ideas on speakers or subjects for next year, please call or write to me. Also, if you would like to bring a class or club to the University for a tour and presentation, give me a call at 581-7023, and I'll try to organize something for you. Thanks again for participating in the contest. We look forward to seeing your team again next year. Sincerely, Dave Hanscom ******************************************************************************* Official Results ---------------- 1996 ACM High School Computer Programming Contest March 15, 1996 University of Utah Department of Computer Science place school points ----- ------ ------ 1 Bingham 428 2 East 481 3 Provo 488 4 Meridian 509 4 West Jordan 509 6 Alta 614 7 Skyline 668 8 Olympus 690 9 Bear River 699 10 Murray 703 11 Cyprus 707 12 Fremont 720 13 Uintah 740 14 Woods Cross 773 15 Clearfield 792 16 Taylorsville 793 17 Brighton 795 18 Hillcrest 799 19 Logan 812 20 Highland 821 21 Waterford 836 22 West 840 23 Cottonwood 843 23 Weber 843 25 Viewmont 849 26 American Fork 876 27 Judge 884 28 Lehi 887 29 Layton 917 30 Bountiful 1001 31 Jordan 1021 31 North Summit 1021 33 Bonneville 1075 34 Mountain Crest 1088 35 Richfield 1191 36 Payson 1200 Scores are the total number of minutes needed to solve 5 different problems. Any problem not solved by the end of 3 hours is given 200 points. Total points are increased by the score on a take-home problem which is scored on a scale of 0-200; the best take-home problem is given 0 points, and others are scored relative to that one.