Competitive Programming on TV?

The UVic programming teams have recently been receiving some media coverage. Saanich News did an article on the guys and UVic released a small media tip about our performance at the Pacific Northwest regional competition a few weeks ago.

Also, at our last practice, A Channel News came and filmed some of the session as well as interviewed myself and some of the guys on the team. They put together a really nice piece on us, which aired last night. They took kind of a sports angle on the ACM ICPC programming competitions. Will competitive problem solving be the next big hit reality TV show? (umm, probably not :-)

I thought the piece was really well done. Jordan Cunningham put it together and did a fantastic job. A friend of mine was nice enough to record the broadcast and put it online. You can check it out below.

University of Victoria Computer Programming Team from Donald Peterson on Vimeo.

On the practice front, we studied a variety of dynamic programming problems at Wednesday night's practice and I've been organizing a fairly large practice for this Sunday. Stanford is hosting the competition and I've been coordinating with their coach about problems and various invited teams. I'm very excited about this practice as I actually managed to get some Eastern North American teams to join. McGill, University of Rochester, and St. Mary's have all confirmed that they are joining and I have sent invites to MIT, Dalhousie, UNB, and Mount Allison University.