News about Dyalog

Aug 1, 2009

250 download free educational license resulting in 27 submissions from all regions of the globe

Basingstoke - UK, 10th August 2009: Dyalog Ltd., that markets Dyalog APL – the most commonly used APL programming language throughout the world - is pleased to announce the top prize winners of their Worldwide Computer Programming Contest 2009.

First Prize Winner; Ronald Chan from Auckland, New Zealand. The First Prize includes a round trip to Dyalog '09 in Princeton New Jersey USA September 13-16 2009 where Ronald will receive the award in person and present the work that lead to winning the prize.

Second Prize Winner is Chris King from Brown University, Rhode Island USA and Third Prize winner is Maks Verver from the Netherlands.

The Judges justification for Ronald's winning submission reads: "Ronald's submission showed impressive insight and analysis of the problems and the underlying mathematics, good use of classes. His submission ran considerably faster than any other entry. Ronald documented his solutions very well and many of his solutions were of a form to solve more general problems than the specific Project Euler problem presented. His efforts included error checking to capture invalid inputs".

Ronald, soon to be Bachelor of Engineering (Hons.) - Mechatronics Engineering (Accelerated Pathway) is an experienced competitor at maths Olympiads and international computer contests. He comments, "I am quite excited to have achieved this placing, and look forward to the trip to the conference in September. I heard about the contest from a lecturer at university - Michael Dinneen - who organises the programming contests held on site at university. As for the contest, math and informatics olympiads really gave me the skills to do this contest effectively. I have had no prior APL experience. In fact, I had not even heard of this language before. As soon as I saw how easy the 20 questions were, I immediately thought that many competitors would be able to do all questions. So I decided to heavily optimize runtime for the questions. In optimizing the runtime, I drew on what I knew about computers and programming languages in general."

The competition was launched April 27 2009 with a deadline for submission on July 1 2009. More than 250 downloaded the free Educational License and, of those, more than 10% entered the competition. The entrants came from all over the world with submissions from Argentina, Canada, Estonia, India, South Korea, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, The Netherlands, Ukraine and USA. The competition was open to all students from high school or younger up to University level and used Project Euler as the vehicle http://projecteuler.net/.

It should also be mentioned that 20 consolation prizes will be drawn and announced during Dyalog '09 September 13-16 2009. The results will be posted to www.dyalog.com and the consolation prize winners will also be contacted directly by Dyalog Ltd.

The Worldwide Programming Competition will be run again in 2010.