The SBITC is a competition for teams of undergraduate and honours students. The teams receive a number of problems and have to write the programs to solve the problems. They do not know the data that will be used to test their programs and incur heavy penalties for submitting incorrect answers.

The Heats are run at universities and the Finals take place in Gauteng.

Heats

Thirteen universities entered. Some universities entered a large number of teams. Eventually the following number of teams took part.

Cape Peninsula University of Technology Entered but did not participate
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University:  2 teams
North West University:  3 teams
Rhodes University 7:  teams
Stellenbosch University:  1 team
University of Cape Town:  5 teams
University of Johannesburg:  3 teams
University of KwaZulu-Natal:  10 teams
University of Limpopo:  10 teams
University of Pretoria:  4 teams
University of the Western Cape:  9 teams
University of the Witwatersrand:  9 teams
Walter Sisulu University:  6 teams

The Heats were not without drama.

• UCT had a power failure and the UCT teams travelled to the UWC to participate.
• Some universities did not print out the usernames and passwords and teams had trouble logging in.

Questions:

For questions from the Heats see Past Papers.

Finals

It has become a tradition to introduce a surprise for every final. For 2013 the surprise was that one of the questions was released before breakfast (approximately 90 min before the contest started) with the instruction: “You can ask the lecturers, you can phone a friend, or anything else to solve this problem.”

For some universities this was the only question they had correct. For the organisers it created a problem in that all eleven teams wanted to submit immediately when the contest started.

Awards Function

The theme for 2013 was “Standard Bank is going green!” to celebrate the new Standard Bank HQ building which was designed to be “green” (environmentally friendly and energy efficient).

Results

First Place University of Cape Town
Team: Some bumbling idiots trying to code
Team members: Graham Manuell, Gwylim Ashley, Jacobus van der Merwe and Shu-Yu Hsu
Questions answered: 7 out of 7 questions
Prizes: R170,000 for the Computer Science Department sponsored by CIB IT
4 x laptops for the students sponsored by DELL

Second Place University of Stellenbosch
Team: facepalm.gif
Team members: Gerard Louw, Robert Ketteringham, Nikita Hiralal and Alex Wright
Questions answered: 7 out of 7 questions
Prizes: R20,000 for the Computer Science Department sponsored by CIB IT
4 x tablets for the students sponsored by DELL

Third Place University of Witwatersrand
Team: Thabang Knightriders
Team members: Steven James, Raphael Moutzouris, Jeremy Lai Hong and Naledi Modise
Questions answered: 5 out of 7 questions
Prizes: R10,000 for the Computer Science Department sponsored by CIB IT
4 x Digital Photo Frames for the students sponsored by DG Store

Runners-up (in alphabetical order)
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Team
North West University Team
Rhodes University Team
Standard Bank Blue Team
Standard Bank White Team
University of KwaZulu-Natal Team
University of the Western Cape Team

No 2 and No 1 team BOTH solved 7 problems i.e. all the problems. When this happens the winning team is chosen on time. The timing is complicated because there is a penalty every time a team submits an incorrect solution.

Some facts and stats

Nine university teams and two Standard Bank teams participated in the finals.

The eleven teams submitted 90 solutions and not a single one had a compilation error!

53 had the correct answer
11 had the wrong answer
9 timed out
17 crashed, but not through format errors

Questions: 

For questions from the Finals see Past Papers.