NZ Programming Contest placing

Datamine are excited to announce a placing in the recent New Zealand Programming Contest. Datamine technical analyst, Tom Pledger, who entered the competition under the name Low Hanging Fruit, took out second place in the Open category of the contest.

Despite placing second, Tom achieved a flawless result on the scoreboard, indicating that every solution submitted was correct on the first try.

Tom works in the software development side of Datamine, New Zealand’s leading data analytics company. Paul O’Connor, who heads up the technical team at Datamine is thrilled to have such a programming powerhouse within the ranks. “We pick our team based on their skill and expertise. Industry recognition like this reinforces that we’re getting the best people on board,” says Paul.

Tom has been competing on and off in these competitions for the last 20 years, the highlights of which consist of being in the Victoria University team that finished 4th in the world finals of the ACM Scholastic Programming Contest in 1991, and winning the NZ Programming Contest in 2004.

According to Tom, there is a strategy to competing that takes some planning: “You want to work on the highest-value problems that you’re confident of getting finished within the time limit. My entrant name is to remind me to pick off all the easy problems before having a tilt at the 100-pointers.”

About the contest, Tom adds: “I admire the humourous and neatly self-contained problems the organisers come up with, and appreciate all the volunteer work that goes into running the contest.”

The competition took place on August 22 2009 in various sites across the country and is designed to test problem-solving and programming skills in an Olympic-style context. Entrants are allocated a computer and given a number of problems to attempt in a set time using any of the contest computer programming languages.