Meet the First and Second Place Prize Winners of the Worldwide Computer Programming Competition at APL2010
Grand Prize winner
Ryan Tarpine, Computer Science at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA. Ryan also won The Hofstader-Conway problem in the Rosetta Challenge.
Ryan is a 25-year-old PhD Candidate in Computer Science with a focus on computational biology. His dad first taught him how to program in QBasic, and he eventually moved on to C/C++ and soon thereafter OCaml. Ryan says that he enjoyed learning about unusual languages like Forth, Prolog and SNOBOL as each made you think about the same problems in interesting new ways. Ryan works with large amounts of data in many forms, including genomic sequences, sequence annotations and journal articles. He is interested in seeing how APL can be applied to these areas. Other than programming, Ryan enjoys traveling, biking and studying Islam.
About on his Grand Prize winning Ryan says, "I was astonished to hear that I won first prize - I thought only in my dreams could I win something like this! I originally heard about this contest last year (2009) through an email from Brown Professor Maurice Herlihy. I took out a few books from the library about APL and read some articles online. I ultimately did not submit last year, but I learned a lot. This year I was determined to enter. The Mastering Dyalog APL book freely available online was extremely helpful in trying to wrap my head around the APL way of doing things. I recommend that everyone interested in learning about APL read this book and have fun with the exercises".
You can meet Ryan Tarpine at the APL2010 Conference in Berlin, Germany – September 13-16 2010, where he will present the solution which won him the Grand Prize.
Second Prize winner
Mstislav Elagin, Mathematics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.
Mstislav studied applied mathematics specializing in statistics at the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute. Upon graduation he moved to Germany and spent several years working as a research assistant on projects ranging from reliability in non-destructive testing through environmental monitoring to financial econometrics. He is 32 and currently a PhD student at the Humboldt-Universitδt zu Berlin developing an online monitoring and early warning system for financial markets.
Through his studies in statistics Mstislav got to know XLISP-Stat as well as R and he also became interested in the functional programming approach. Other languages that turned out to be eye-openers (or mind-benders?) are Scheme, OCaml and Tcl.
Mstislav comments on his Second Prize win as follows, "I am delighted to receive such wonderful news! Of course, I will attend the conference in Berlin and will be happy to give a presentation, just please give me a time frame. I found out about the Dyalog contest from the comp.lang.apl newsgroup or possibly from the Vector blog. I first encountered APL about three months ago while working on my PhD thesis. The project required a source of decent volumes of market data, and the database that I got access to happened to use kdb+ as the engine. This naturally lead me to learning kdb+'s underlying language, q, and eventually into the fascinating world of APL. I consider APL as a wealth of ideas, and even if I am not directly using it in "production" at present, it has definitely influenced and enriched my programming style. I would like to thank the contest organizers as well as the judges for putting into effect this great challenge, and look forward to making new acquaintances at the conference".
You can meet Mstislav Elagin at the APL2010 Conference in Berlin, Germany – September 13-16 2010 and we’re already looking forward to his presentation.
Ryan's and Mstislav's presentations will be held on Thursday 16 September, 14:30–16:30.