CSE / UNSW / CISRA High Schools Programming Competition 2003

Grand Final Results

Rank	School	Team	Language	Task 1 Needle	Task 3 Thomas	Task 4 BitCode	TOTAL
1	Anglican Church Grammar School	Vikings	VB	*10		**10	***20
2	Glenunga International High School	Phreakers	C++		**10	*10	***20
3	Knox Grammar School	Chomp	Python	***10		*10	****20
4	Hurlstone Agricultural High School	HAHS_4T5	Haskell			*10	*10
4	The King's School	TKS 122	C++			*10	*10
6	Sydney Boys High School	Cuttooth	Pascal	*		*10	**10

* indicates each time a team asked for a question to be marked (if teams were on equal points, the team with less *'s placed ahead)

This year's final was extremely tough, extremely hard fought, and extremely close! In the end, the top two teams had to go down to a tiebreaker: which team could calculate quickest the lowest 4-digit number that is both a square and a palindrome. Anglican Church came up with a clever on-the-spot solution, recognizing that the problem could be treated as a radix shift, edging out the unlucky team from Glenunga.

Congratulations to Anglican Church Grammar School, who will also get the chance to represent Australia at the international programming competition.

Some teams had great difficulty ensuring accuracy to a certain number of decimal places. his issue was touched upon in the Preliminary Round (with the Card Game Simulation question) but it seems that teams need to be aware of how to make sure that solutions are accurate to a specific degree. Guaranteeing a correct solution (at least to a certain number of decimal places) is a very important concept - it is not very different to making sure that one gets an accurate solution! We hope that teams for next year are aware of this issue, and that this topic may some day be addressed in the HSC curriculum.