The BYU Chapter of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, held an opening social on September 10 to get things started for the 2008-2009 school year.

In addition to the traditional pizza and pop, ACM members participated in a short programming contest. The participants were divided into three groups, according to experience and level in the CS program. The programming challenges were difficult, and the pressure was high as the contestants attempted to complete the problems before the hour-and-a half time limit was reached. Although many contestants came close to producing a working program before the time was up, four winners emerged as the champions of the first ACM programming contest of the school year.

Mirza Garibovic won the advanced division contest, with an elegant solution to a problem requiring a program to detect the depth of an arbitrary number of possibly nested triangles. Derek McDaniel won the middle division contest by creating a mini-search engine used to select sample pages by keyword matching. Chris Tensmeyer and A.J. ONeal won the lower division contest which dealt with the transformation of octal fractions. In the above picture, Mirza, Derek, and Chris are pictured after the awards ceremony.  Prizes for the winners of the event were donated by Best Buy.

For information about upcoming ACM chapter activities, contact acm@byu.edu.