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Left to right: Alex Farfan, Joshua Camacho, Tsz Kwan[/caption]
A three-member team from Riverside City College won the 2015 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Southern California Programming Competition.
Joshua Camacho (Riverside Poly High School), Alex Farfan (Chaparral HS, Temecula) and international student Tsz Kwan won the Two-Year College Division after solving more problems than 24 other community college and 40 university teams. The three students also tied the all-time record for the number of problems solved. A team from California Institute of Technology won the Four-Year College Division, beating the likes of Harvey-Mudd College, USC, each of the University of California institutions, the Cal State universities and a number of private colleges in attendance. With its victory in the Four-Year College Division, Caltech advances to the world competition in Thailand.
Riverside City College hosted the weekend event for the 16th consecutive year. IBM sponsored the event, which is an annual multi-tiered competitive programming competition that lasts all day ending in a grueling five-hour coding marathon. The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is headquartered at Baylor University and is directed by William B. Poucher, a Baylor professor.
This wasn’t the first time a team of students from RCC took home the top prize.
“About nine years ago we had a team take first place,” Mark Lehr, professor of Engineering and Computer Science, said. “They did well compare to previous teams because they have been practicing for most of the year, certainly since the beginning of the spring semester. Each of the students has had coding up to data structures and discrete mathematics.”
Four-year universities are allowed to have seniors and first year graduate students; however, community colleges are limited to freshmen and sophomores.
Lehr said Camacho will be graduating and transferring to Cal Poly Pomona, while Farfan plans on attending UC Merced. Kwan is considering UC San Diego in order to finish his degree.
