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ProQuest 2003 held at KU
KEEPING last year’s tradition alive, this year too the ACM chapter of the Department of Computer Science, Karachi University arranged a nationwide quiz, programming and software competition on Sept 22-23. It was called ProQuest’03.
The word ProQuest is derived from PROgramming and QUESTion. The idea of ProQuest
’02 came up in March 2002, after the previous executive council of ACM, CS KU took over. A simulation of the main event was organized at the departmental level. After the positive results it yielded, it was decided to turn it into a national-level event. This year, the new ACM CSKU executive council organized ProQuest ’03 to make it a tradition and platform for the students of IT institutions all over Pakistan to compete for good gesture.
Teams from 16 prominent IT participated in the competitions. They were: NU-FAST, Karachi; Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology; Usman Institute of Information Technology; Jinnah University for Women; Mohammad Ali Jinnah University; Institute of Business Administration; Institute of Business Management (CBM); Bahria Institute of Management and Computer Science; CAMS College of Business and Information Technology; Iqra University, Asian Management Institute (AMI); NED University of Engineering and Technolog; Aligarh Institute of Information Technology; Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (SZABIST); Industec Institute of Information Technology; National University of Science and Technology; and Department of Computer Science, University of Karachi.
While the quiz and software competitions took place at the well decorated Sheikh Zayed Auditorium and its adjoining dome, the programming competition took place at the department of computer science labs. Vans were provided for transportation between the auditorium and the labs. The arrangements made at Sheikh Zayed and DCS spoke of the dedication of the teachers of DCS and the hard work of the organizers and volunteers.
The main sponsor of the event was Philips Pakistan; National Bank of Pakistan, Soneri Bank, SSGC, SatNet, WOL, Arena MutliMedia and Pakola were among co-sponsors.
After the opening ceremony and the accompanying refreshments the programming and software competition teams proceeded to their respective places while the quiz teams stayed back at the auditorium. The first day of the event was a practice session day for the programming participants.
Four quiz competitions were held and winner teams were selected for the semifinals. The group competitions had three rounds of questions. In the first round each team answered three questions, in the second round each individual participant was asked a question from a category that he or she chose and the final and most exciting round was extempore in which one individual from each team answered as many questions as possible in one minute.
The first two rounds had MCQs to avoid any sort of ambiguity and were negatively marked too. The quiz questions were not only displayed on the PC screens of the teams but also as a slide show for the audience.
On the second day, the first semifinal of the quiz competition started between SSUET and NUST. The former won. The second semifinal was held between CBM and DCS Team 1 which the home team won. The semifinal had another added round of general knowledge questions about computer science. DCS Team 1 won the final by defeating the qualifying semi-finalist SSUET by a large margin. The final had an extra round in which the participant could chose a rank of questions each with different scores and levels.
While this was going on at the Sheikh Zayed Auditorium, DCS was bustling with the programming. The programming teams were given four hours to solve six problems. The judgement was made on the number of questions successfully solved by the teams. In case of a tie, time taken to solve the problems and the number of wrong submissions was taken into consideration. The teams could choose between C, C++ and Java to solve the given problems.
Meanwhile the software competition was lively with the exhibitors explaining their work to the visitors. The judgement criteria for the software competition included domain knowledge, presentation skills, logic and tools used, complexity of problem, response time, budget, future extension among others.
The prizes for the event were given away at the colorful closing ceremony of ProQuest ’03 on Sept 23 at the auditorium.
Later prizes were distributed among the winners. For all the three competitions the winners got a 105S Philips Monitor, the 1st runners up were awarded an AZ 1005 Philips Sound Machine while the 2nd runners up won an AZ 1004 Philips Sound Machine.
The Programming competition was won by FAST while Bahria and IndusTec were the 1st and 2nd runners up, respectively. For the software competition the first prize was secured by NED for its software Urdu Messenger for Mobile Devices while second and thrid prizes were bagged by UIT for Schedule Management System and SZABIST for Madadcar. Apart from that UIT’s Hand Navigator and SSUET’s Auto Mate got special mention.
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