Ben's Blog

Back in October I had the opportunity to compete in the 5th annual IEEEXtreme programming competetion, a 24 hour challenge to complete as many programming problems as possible. There were a total of about 16 problems, released roughly once per hour or so. Our team completed around 5 or 6 problems (some were remarked after the completion of the competition due to a bug in the test system, so I am not sure about the final tally). Our team started with 3 members, but unfortunately we were down to 2 about 8 hours in, but we still felt as though we managed to do pretty well. We recently got the results back and were pleased to discover that we came in 240th (out of a total of 1515 teams), putting us in the top 16%! We also came in 14th place in Canada and 3rd place at our home University. I somehow managed to miss this event every other year it has happened but have always wanted to go, so I am glad that I got this final chance to compete.