University of Minnesota Morris teams placed first and fifth overall out of 19 teams at the 2023 Digi-Key Collegiate Computing Competition, held on Oct. 20 in Thief River Falls.
Team Phantom members Linnea Gilbertson, Ash Plasek, and John Walbran took first by a 32-point margin with 263 points, scoring the most points by a large margin (over 2:1) on the short programming problem part of the competition.
Team GPT-4 Pro, with members Dongting Cai, Harry Lyu, Yubo Mao, and Chenfei Peng, took fifth with 173 points and the highest number of points on the long programming problem part of the competition.
The competition is divided into three parts:
- Word problems, where the students have an hour to solve (on paper) a collection of math and logic puzzles
- Short programming problems, where the students have 90 minutes to solve as many "short" programming problems as they can out of a set of 15 "simple" problems. The average team this year solved between 1 and 3; Team Phantom solved more than 10.
- Long programming problems, where the students have 90 minutes to solve as many as they can out of a set of 4 "hard" problems. The average team this year solved well under one-half of a problem [partial credit is allowed]; Team GPT Pro-4 solved 1 problem completely and got partial credit on all 3 of the other problems.
The sum of these three scores is then used as the overall score for the final rankings.
The members of the first-place team each received a $300 prize, and the UMN Morris computer science discipline received a $5,000 award for that first-place finish. UMN Morris will also host the bronze traveling trophy in a Division of Science and Mathematics display case for the next year.
This is UMN Morris’s seventh first-place finish, along with four second-place finishes and five third-place finishes. While the prize amounts have changed over the years, Morris students have earned the computer science discipline a total of more than $40,000 in prize money, and well over $10,000 of prize money for the individual students.
Digi-Key has hosted this competition at their Thief River Falls headquarters every fall since 2000. Participating colleges are allowed to bring two teams of up to four members and all participating students must be at least third-year students. UMN Morris has participated since 2002.