December 31, 2003
Rokos cracks top computer code contest
Traverse City student to compete in world finals held in Czech Republic
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Kyle Rokos will experience a different kind of Prague spring in March.
The graduate student in computer science at Michigan Technological University will head to the Czech Republic to participate in the 28th Annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals.
Along with team members Joe Nievelt of Royal Oak and Patrick Williams of Otsego, Rokos will match brains with the best and brightest code writers the world over.
"It is fun, I really like puzzles," said Rokos, a 1999 graduate of West Senior High School. "Working with a team is usually pretty good, someone is typing it up while someone looks over their shoulder."
Nievelt and Rokos took third place in a regional competition that included 177 teams from 70 colleges and universities in the upper Midwest. This competition was held simultaneously at multiple sites in early November. The Michigan Tech students competed at a site in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada. Different sites completed different but comparable problems, in all cases one team per room cranking out code in the team's choice of Java, C or C++.
"Every problem was worth the same amount of points and if you got more problems right than other teams then you automatically win," Rokos said. "If there is a tie, then the winner is the team with the lowest total number of minutes to solve them."
To attend the world competition, each team is required to have three members. After qualifying in November to go to Prague, the pair invited Williams aboard. Both Nievelt and Williams are undergraduate computer science majors.
A veteran programmer, Rokos said the trick to solving the nine problems in five hours given at the regional competition is planning and prioritization. He and his teammates will carry this strategy with them to Prague.
"A lot of it is figuring out how to do it, the programming itself isn't that complicated," said Rokos, who with Nievelt placed fifth in the regional competition in 2002. "Figuring out what you need to do is usually harder than coding."
Prioritizing the nine problems is part of the strategy of a coding competition as different problems take different amounts of time to solve. Spending hours on one problem at the very beginning could jeopardize the team as fewer problems would be completed.
In the regional competition, he and Nievelt quickly scanned the assignment and worked first on the problems they could knock off quickly before delving into the more convoluted ones.
"The problems are easy such as given a dollar amount and the interest rate, compute the amount of interest paid every month over the year," he said. "Or, given a polygon with 'n' sides, how many stars can be drawn."
Winning an invitation to Prague is a plum for the students and the university, noted Linda Ott, chair of Michigan Tech's department of computer science.
"This is extremely high caliber," Ott said. "It is a great honor and I'm really proud of the students for achieving at this level.
"We've had teams compete in the past but at that time the comp was at a smaller scale," she added. "This is the first time one has qualified for world competition."
A dual major in discrete math and computer science, Rokos relishes the kind of mind challenges that programming provides. His interest in computers took root in high school and he plans a career in the field, though he is not yet sure in what capacity.
The five-day trip to Prague is exciting, however, and he is thrilled to immerse himself in the company of a couple hundred other devoted programmers for that time.
"There are only 70 teams that go from around the world," he said. "At three people per team, that's only 210 people in the world who get to go, so that's exciting."