October 27, 2011
School of Engineering, Amritapuri
The ACM-ICPC World Finals will be conducted in May 2012 in Poland. It may well be that an Amrita student is at these World Finals representing India.
Sai Vikneshwar, third-year student of B.Tech. (Computer Science and Engineering) at the Amritapuri campus is being groomed for such participation. Recently he took part in an online programming contest organized by NIT Calicut.
Koder Kup was a seven-day affair, wherein two winners were chosen on all seven days based on the accuracy of their solutions to challenging coding problems as well as the speed with which they submitted their solutions.
On Day three, Amrita student Sai was chosen as one of the winners.
Other winners from other days included previous ACM-ICPC world finalists as well as professional programmers.
“There were two questions, one easy and the other one hard. Both were to be solved within a time limit of 65 minutes. We were only allowed to use C or C++,” shared Sai.
“The competition was intense with coders from all over the country participating. This was a nice platform for me to test my skills and also know where I stand,” he added.
Sai described his motivation for wanting to become a top programmer.
“Finding a solution for a given problem through coding requires us to first come up with an idea and then develop an algorithm. A lot of mental work is involved. Solving a problem provides immense satisfaction and encourages us to try and solve more and more problems.”
Sai’s passion and skills for programming recently landed him an internship with the IT giant Microsoft.
SPOJ (Sphere Online Judge) is a web forum with over 120,000 registered users and over 9000 coding problems that can be solved in C, C++, Java, Python, or many other programming languages.
In this forum, Sai is rated within the top 1000 programmers world-wide. This rating was earned by him based on the number of problems he solved and submitted online.
“He puts forth a lot of effort,” stated his teacher, Assistant Professor Padmamala Sriram from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
“He is not afraid to tackle coding problems that no one else seems to know how to solve. He has a positive attitude and is self motivated. I see a bright future ahead for him,” she added.
“Chancellor Amma has asked us to prepare a team that will qualify for the ICPC World Finals,” shared Dr. Vallath Nandakumar, Contest Director, Asia-Amrita Site. “Sai Vikneshwar is one of the team members that we are actively grooming for this.”
