Trio of Dakota State students take on world's toughest coding challenge

Jennifer Leither, The Daily Republic, Mitchell, S.D.
·4 min read

Apr. 29—MADISON, S.D. — Ready, set, code!

Last fall, teams of college students around the globe were busy competing in regional coding contests with the ultimate goal of being named the best student programming team in the world. Organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is the biggest and most prestigious of its kind. Among those competing in the first round of competition in November was a team of three students from Dakota State University.

Nora Sandison, Dax Patel and Joshua Ganschow are all members of the DSU team, "team NaN," that placed 10th in the North Central North American Division. NaN, DSU's coach Austin O'Brien explained, is an inside joke for folks who work with data that means "Not a Number." Team NaN is now preparing to participate in the North American Championship from May 23 to 28 at the University of Central Florida. It will compete against 49 other teams for a chance to move on to the International Championship in September, held in Astana, Kazakhstan.

North America is divided into 11 regions for the ICPC. DSU is part of the North Central North American division. In this division, 129 teams competed at one of 19 host sites. Team NaN competed at the University of Minnesota — Twin Cities. The North Central North American region includes teams from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Western Ontario, Manitoba, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansans, and the upper peninsula of Michigan.

The ACM-ICPC challenges university students with complicated programming problems for which they must design and implement clever algorithms. The contest pits teams of three university students against eight or more problems with a grueling five-hour deadline and one computer. Competitors race against the clock and the winner is the team that correctly and most quickly solves the most problems.

O'Brien explained programming competitions include a big list of what are essentially math problems, and the team is tasked with writing a program that can solve that problem given any arbitrary input.

"Once a team codes a solution to a problem, they send it to the judges to verify it," O'Brien said. "The judges verify its correctness by feeding it a large number of inputs and checking its output. A solution is deemed correct if it produces the correct output in all test cases quickly, as each problem has a time limit and slow solutions are considered incorrect. Incorrect solutions incur penalty points, but teams can try as many times as needed to get a problem correct; penalty points are only used to break ties."

Team NaN solved five problems. No team completed all 12 questions that they were faced with, which is not uncommon O'Brien said.

"I'd say the hardest part sometimes is just figuring out when to quit and switch to a different problem entirely," Sandison said.

Strategy is definitely the name of the game, Ganshow said.

"You don't want to spend all your time on one problem when you could be doing one of the easier ones," Ganschow said. "They give you a range of difficulties, but you have to determine which ones are going to be harder and easier."

O'Brien is incredibly proud of the team's advance to the North American Championship. He said it's only their second team to ever do so. DSU sent a team to the national championship in Georgia back in 2020.

"This is a very young team so that makes it even more exciting," O'Brien said. "Teams that usually do well are teams that have qualified for nationals before."

Having sent a team to nationals before, O'Brien used that trip as an opportunity to just experience the competition and learn. Now he hopes to take a more competitive approach.

"Hopefully this year is the start of continual improvement as we go on," O'Brien said.

Ganschow says he most values the lessons in teamwork and the opportunity to network. "Besides the obvious goal of success, I want to meet other like-minded individuals who enjoy programming and problem solving as much as I do," Ganschow said. "Gathering many of the country's best collegiate programmers in one place will be a great opportunity for this."