USACO Wins Baltic Olympiad

by Rob Kolstad
Head Coach, USA Computing Olympics
<[email protected]>

The U.S.A. team of six high school students won the informal team competition at the Baltic Olympiad in Informatics, an annual international programming contest held this year in Riga, Latvia, on the weekend of April 18, 1999. Six Baltic countries attended, with the U.S.A. invited as a guest country.

Each of two days of competition included a five-hour round of programming in which each student, working individually, was given three problems. At the end of each round, solutions were scored against sets of judges' test data.

Reid Barton, 15, of Boston, Massachusetts, won second place individual overall. Boulder, Colorado, resident Daniel Wright, 18, placed third overall. Other members of the winning U.S. team were Percy Liang, 16, Arizona; Po-Shen Loh, 16, Wisconsin; Jon McAlister, 17, Texas; and Kenn Hamm, 16, New York. The team of six was chosen from the best performers in the country in a series of U.S.A. Computing Olympiad (USACO) programming contests held over the past six months. USACO coach Greg Galperin served as Team Leader.

Outside the contest, the trip gave students the opportunity to meet champion programmers from the other countries attending, as well as to tour the beautiful city of Riga, the capital of Latvia.

Here is a typical problem from the contest:

Given two sets A and B of strings, determine the shortest string which is a concatenation of strings from set A and which is also a concatenation of strings from set B. The sets A and B can have up to 100 strings of up to 50 characters each. Your program has five seconds to run on a Pentium-200.

USACO (<http://www.usaco.org/>) is fully supported by USENIX.