Team TnTWizard from left to right: Duncan Page, Thomas Barnette, and Trey Woodlief.
ECE students were top performers in a global online programming contest called IEEEXtreme. The leading NC State team, named TnTWizard (for Thomas Barnette, Alan “Trey” Woodlief, and Duncan Page) came in 2nd in the US and 24th in the entire world, affirmation of the high quality of students enrolled in ECE.
IEEEXtreme is a global challenge in which teams of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Student members compete in a 24-hour time span against each other to solve a set of programming problems. IEEE, the world’s leading technical professional association for the advancement of technology, conducts the programming competition.
Problems can only be answered in one of the supported languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Haskell, Clojure, Scala, Common Lisp, Lua, Erlang, Javascript, Go, Groovy, OCaml, F#, LOLCODE, Smalltalk, Tcl, R, Racket, Rust, Swift, Pascal, Bash and D. Teams are entitled to use any methodology they want to solve the problems as long as it works correctly. According to the IEEEXtreme website, the competition is about solving real-world problems and it includes questions from various difficulties, from novice to expert levels.
This year’s competition began simultaneously around the world on 24 October, 2015 at 00:00:00 UTC. Trey Woodlief of Team TnTWizard says his team didn’t train specifically for the event, but “the three of us each have experience working with problems on hackerrank.com, where IEEEXtreme is hosted, and also codingame.com, a very similar website that offers a set of coding puzzles and competitions. Team member Duncan Page specifically has put in a lot of training here and is ranked 9th in the world in Codingame, out of over 200,000; thus we call him ‘The Wizard.’”
This year, ECE had a total of 13 teams compete. Another top performing team from NC State was 16th nationally ranked “HowToTrainYourPython.”
Although IEEEXtreme is a virtual event, teams often organize around their local IEEE student branch and join together to host the event. According to ECE student Daniel Saconn, co-chair of the NC State student branch of IEEE, “The competition is a great programming exercise. The competition also provides an opportunity to work with other people and helps to develop your ability to work on a team.”
Trey Woodlief of Team TnTWizard agrees. “We learned a lot from the experience and are very excited to try for number one in the country (and hopefully the world) next year.”