Future Technology Leaders Compete In International Code Wars
Students at a dozen prestigious computer science universities are set to compete in the inaugural Windward International Intercollegiate Programming Championship on January 28, 2012. Boston University, Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Harvey Mudd College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, Stanford University, University of Illinois, University of Maryland, University of Massachusetts, University of Toronto and University of Wisconsin are among the schools that have accepted the code-war challenge.
Sponsored by Windward, the champion in easy-to-use reporting, document generation and business intelligence software, the code war is a competition among teams to see who can write the best code. Students race against the clock and each other to analyze a problem, write a solution, test and debug it. After the 8-hour programming deadline, teams go head to head.
“The future of technology is primarily software, and these students are some of the most brilliant programmers in the world,” Dave Thielen, founder and CTO says. “Spending a Saturday writing code for no reason other than the challenge demonstrates they have the curiosity and initiative required to create brilliant new products no one has thought of yet.”
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4aZPol2gZo]
In the contest, Thielen creates a game for which each team writes an A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) player. Each school will have its own playoff, with the A.I.s written by that school’s teams doing their best to kill one another off. The top two teams from each school then will run against one another in the final games for the national programming championship.
“We figured this would be a fun contest between the top schools where the competition could be over programming instead of sports,” Thielen said. “Events like this add significantly to the college experience by reinforcing a joy of learning purely for the sake of increased knowledge and providing a more diverse educational experience.”
The competition follows on the heels of the successful first ever collegiate code war, which took place at The University of Colorado in Boulder on August 27, 2011.
