First Round of Programming Golf

We had our first round of programming golf today! For those of you that missed it, here’s how it went down:
About 15 ACM members gathered at our meeting room in HEC 117. After our normal proceedings, one of our officers gave members a brief introduction to PHP syntax. Soon after, we all relocated to HEC 308 (The Cave) and began a programming competition in this new language. You can see the presentation we used to show some basics of PHP Here.

What is Programming Golf?

Programming Golf is a style of programming competition where instead of delivering the solution in the fastest time, we look for the solution delivered in the least number of bytes. The time limit was one hour and we got some pretty decent results for that time span.

We like programming golf because it allows us the opportunity to help students all across the board. Novices can learn work through the problem and use their skills to find a solution while experts need to use their creativity to find was to continue minimizing the code.

We used the programming golf system at http://golf.shinh.org/all.rb for a list of programming problems and a submission interface. We used an online compiler, Codepad.org to test our solutions before submitting them.

Results

For this round of golf, we chose a programming problem called FizzBuzz (#34 on the list mentioned above). It’s an easy problem but it served as fair grounds for learning new syntax.

Here are the results after the jump: