ARHS sent three teams to participate in the High School Computer Programming Contest at Western New England College on Friday, March 19. All three of the ARHS teams did well in the competition and one of those teams took first place honors! The winning team consisted of Jeremy Salwen, Surya Murty, Charlie Barto, and Lou Fogel (pictured below, from left to right).
At the contest, students are divided into teams of four to work on a set of seven computer programming problems over the span of four hours. Each team is allotted a single computer work station for testing and submitting solutions. This means that teamwork and effective communication are crucial. During the competition, the students alternated between working individually and working together. If one student comes up with a solution that has a small bug, another student can bring a fresh pair of eyes to analyze and fix the bug.
ARHS Team 2, consisting of Noam Zilberstein, Otis Rowell, Sean Brennan and Sam Sussman, also made a strong showing by solving four of the seven problems and coming in fourth at the contest. ARHS Team 3, made up of Emma Anderson, Conor Power, Liam Dunn and Josh Wolfman, solved two of the problems and came in eighth. The problems are challenging and many teams at the competition did not solve any of them. To learn more about the competition and see some of the problems that students solve, visit WNEC’s website at http://mars.wnec.edu/hscontest/.
Contest organizers were very surprised that ARHS Team 1 solved all seven problems at the competition, with time to spare. The last problem, which involved analyzing data from a make-believe language, was intended to be the stumper problem for the contest. WNEC Computer Science Professor Leh-Sheng Tang said that the problem is on the level that they typically use for collegiate computer programming competitions.
Jeremy Salwen, class of 2010, took the lead on solving the stumper problem, using a data structure known as a tree and a programming technique called recursion. He did not arrive at his solution immediately, however. Solving a problem in computer programming often entails coming up with multiple approaches and then ruling them out systematically. Salwen said that the process of analyzing why something wouldn’t work eventually led him to figure out what would in fact work. Teammates Lou Fogel and Charlie Barto were devising an approach of their own to the stumper problem, and it was during a conversation with Barto about his approach when something clicked for Salwen and he came up with a successful method.
This year marks Salwen’s fourth year of participating in the competition at WNEC. Over his high school career, Salwen has taught himself multiple programming languages while also taking advanced math courses at Amherst College. He explained the pleasure he finds in these endeavors: "I like figuring out new ways to solve a problem, and discovering a beautiful solution. In this aspect, computer programming is similar to mathematics. However, my enjoyment also partly comes from the satisfaction of completing a job and creating something."
During the fall of his senior year, Salwen got the chance to use his programming skills to create something. He took advantage of the ARHS Senior Year Option Program to work on a research project in the computer science department at the University of Massachusetts. The project involves development of a computer program which will extract and analyze predictions blog authors make about upcoming elections. Salwen’s work involved machine learning, where essentially the computer learns from examples how to make itself smarter. Machine learning is currently a hot field within computer science.
UMass researcher Sebastian Riedel has worked closely with Salwen. "Jeremy has impressed me both with his analytical and mathematical skills, and his coding abilities," Riedel stated. "In practice this meant that he would quickly grasp sophisticated research papers I would hand him... He wrote both clean and easily extendible code, and where the task allowed it, he found creative solutions." Salwen has continued his association with the UMass research team even after his internship ended. According to Riedel, "The really exciting part of this work is still ahead, and I’m sure he will excel here too."
Like Salwen, all of the members of the ARHS programming team have an enthusiasm for math and science, along with a variety of extracurricular interests. For example, Fogel plays for the ARHS ice hockey team, while Barto is a camera operator for ACTV’s Student News show. Wolfman, Power, Zilberstein, Sussman, Fogel, Brennan, Murty and Salwen all participated in the Junior Engineering (JETS) competition held at ARHS earlier in March. Murty was proud to put his plaque from the programming competition on a shelf next to his awards from JETS, Math Counts and multiple sports teams. Upon returning from the programming contest in the afternoon, Murty and Salwen crossed the parking lot and walked over to the athletic fields to join a different set of excellent teammates-- the nationally-ranked ARHS Ultimate squad.