Purdue CS Students Head to NYC for Codecon Finals

04-30-2015

Writer(s): Jesica E. Hollinger

Three Purdue CS students will be participating in Codecon – a programming contest sponsored by Bloomberg on Friday (May 1) in New York City.

The CS team of Logan Gore, Aaron Dierking, and Yao Xiao competed against ten other universities to win a spot at the final Codecon Championship.

Students track their scores and progress over the spring semester and the top three scoring schools travel to the Bloomberg Global Headquarters. 

The contest is all about efficiency – writing optimized code that solves the contest problems within the specified time and memory constraints while accounting for all possible test cases. The contests address many concepts, from simple string parsing to memoization to graph traversal.

The problems are engaging – each with a short, creative backstory, such as helping a robot avoid obstacles in a grid in order to collect the most coins possible, or deriving the fastest way to escape a maze which contains fire-breathing dragons. Participants can then use the concepts learned while solving these problems in real daily programming tasks.

Friends of CS are encouraged to tweet #CODECON2015! A live feed is available at 6:45pm at http://www.bloomberg.com/live/stream.

Bloomberg currently serves as one of the department’s corporate partners, among those who foster close communication and promote mutually beneficial relationships between academia and industry.