APICS 2003

Wow, what a weekend. I realize that it isn’t over yet, but I spent the last two days in PEI and it certainly feels like it was the weekend. The reason that I was there is for the APICS conference. APICS stands for the Atlantic Provinces Council on the Sciences. (I’m not sure where the ‘I’ comes from - maybe in provinces.)

APICS or no, what this weekend boiled down to was the programming competition. This year Dalhousie sent three teams. My team consisted of Jesse Rusak, Chris Bebbington and myself. We were well prepared, having been practicing for weeks and when we got there we were ready for a good competition. Unfortunately, that isn’t entirely what we got. I will say that I had an amazing time. I had fun, and I got to hang out with 11 other amazing people. (There were 3 teams and 3 coaches). However, during the competition there were some issues with test data which we definitely felt slighted by. Two of the questions had errors in them and we feel it affected our times. That only really matters because we came third. Out of 24 teams. But we were only beaten by 16 minutes (by the way that these competitions are timed - which is kind of hard to explain.) And this wouldn’t really matter except that now we have no idea if we are going to be going to Rochester in three weeks for the regional competition. They always take at least two teams, in the past few years they have taken more because of participation in this division. I guess we won’t know for a week or so.

But not considering the issues surrounding that, as I mentioned, I had a great time. This weekend was basically akin to travelling with a sports team, only much more geeky and no one (not even our coaches) is allowed to watch us perform. However, the atmosphere was the same and that isn’t something that I have ever really had the pleasure of experiencing before. And obviously this whole thing wouldn’t have been possible without the generous backing of the Dean of Computer Science, Dr. Nick Cercone and the hardwork and long hours put in by our coaches, Tony Cox, Vlado Keselj and Marc Comeau. Thank you.