Computer whiz wins world programming competition

A computer genius studying Mechatronics at The University of Auckland’s Faculty of Engineering has won a worldwide programming competition.

Ronald Chan won the Grand Prize in an on-line competition which challenged university students from around the world to solve a series of challenging mathematical problems using the Dyalog APL programming environment.

He is being flown to the United States in September to collect his $2000 prize in person at the Dyalog ’09 Conference in New Jersey. He will also give a presentation on how he solved the problems.

The 20 questions were from Project Euler, a website dedicated to a series of math problems intended to be solved with computer programmes. They included ‘Find the 10001st Prime’ and ‘How many Sundays fell on the first of the month during the twentieth century?’.

“The questions were relatively easy compared to problems I have solved in the past,” Ronald says.

“Finding the solutions to all 20 problems does not guarantee a placing. My gambit was that since the questions were easy to solve, I had to ensure the way I solved them was smarter than anyone else. Most of my effort went into reducing the runtime of the programmes in arriving at the answer.”

He says he reduced run­time by replacing complex calculations with simpler formulas, or improving algorithms, both of which reduce the amount of computation involved in solving the problems.

“I’m really excited about being able to present my submission, and showing all the little tricks and methods I used to improve my solutions,” Ronald says.