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From the President
by Daniel Geer President, USENIX Board of Directors If there is anything that attendance at a USENIX general conference gets you, it is a good sampling of what is out there. I mean people, ideas, tools, skills, outré gizmos, clever adaptations, reminders of your own inadequacies, how fast things are changing, how much there is to know, and how much just plain fun it is to breathe that kind of air. I've been attending for a long time — obviously, or I wouldn't be the damned President. I can remember coming to my first one. Wandered into a marketing talk by Rob Kolstad — Wow! Could he ever sell supercomputers! Hmmm; this is an interesting place. Went to the Reception. Wow! That's Bill Joy! Went up and shook his hand, thanked him for all that BSD stuff I was just learning how to use. Blathered on and made an idiot of myself, I'm sure. Later, and only later, I find out that it really was Dennis Ritchie wearing a badge that said Bill Joy. Never forgave him, but that's why I keep coming. Where else can a story like that happen? That's my point. People come the first time to see what the fuss is, but they stay for reasons that often are idiosyncratic and have on the face of it little to do with The Mission Statement. This is for all of you who are first- or second-timers — keep coming. Yeah, that sounds lame, but I challenge you to find something better. If you do, tell me, 'cuz I'm serious about excellence without hype. But until you do, come to USENIX and watch for that moment when you say to yourself, "USENIX is only a month away and I can't wait to see my colleagues again."
by Peter H. Salus USENIX Historian We emphasize certain anniversaries: lustra (five-year periods) and decades (ten-year periods) especially. In 1975, on June 18, Mel Ferentz ran a meeting of the "Unix Users' Group" at the City University of New York. There were about 40 attendees. June 17—20, 1980, saw over ten times that number gather at the University of Delaware. Steve Daniel distributed "A News" there. The first real news reader. NETNEWS had been written by Steve Bellovin and revised by Daniel and Tom Truscott. There were 15 sites on the UUCP network. That Delaware meeting saw Armando Stettner and Bill Munson recruit Bill Shannon to DEC. June 10—14, 1985, there were 1,730 attendees at the Portland, OR, meeting. Vic Vyssotsky was the keynote speaker. Other speakers were Gordon Bell, Eric Allman, Bjarne Stroustrup, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, Andy Koenig, Tom Ferrin, Dave Yost, Dennis Ritchie, Don Libes, Mike Hawley, Ed Gould, Sam Leffler, Dave Korn, Kirk McKusick, Mike Karels, Brian Redman, and . . . Tektronix sponsored a truly memorable reception. June 11—15, 1990, saw about 1,200 gather in Anaheim to listen to Dennis Ritchie talk about "What happens when your kid turns 21?" There were a number of memorable papers (Cheriton, Ousterhout, Farmer, and Spafford, etc.) and a really stunning session on music by Peter Langston and Mike Hawley. Though it may seem absurd, they were even better than they had been in Atlanta in 1986! USENIX has always been a place where real users got together to pool their knowledge and to renew acquaintance. It's hard to think that in 20 years we've seen the rise and demise of store-and-forward networks; that I can recall V and Mach and Sprite and a host of other systems. The first papers on C++ and on Tcl. The announcement of 3BSD; of 4.4BSD. Give credit to IBM: Big Blue sponsored the meetings that gave rise to SHARE from 1955 on. Software exchanges are nothing new (Mike O'Brien, take a bow); hardware tips aren't, either (your turn, Tom Ferrin). But from May 1974 to now, USENIX has been a focal point. Postlude Tom Duff sent the following: I just read your mention of the "10th anniversary" USENIX meeting in Portland. I hadn't thought about that meeting in a long time.The 1999—2000 USACO Report
by Rob Kolstad Head Coach, USACO For several years, USENIX has sponsored the USA Computing Olympiad, an organization that fosters pre-college computing by offering contests whose winners ultimately travel to exotic foreign locales to represent the USA in international competitions. I am the head coach and work with a fabulous set of people that includes Director Don Piele at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside; Greg Galperin from MIT (now on grad school leave at a startup); Hal Burch (Carnegie Mellon, interning at a startup); Russ Cox (Harvard undergrad); and Brian Dean (MIT grad student). Together we create programming tasks, grade them, evaluate performance, offer feedback and so on. The 1999—2000 Contests The USACO offers programming contests over the Internet throughout the school year. These contests are "open entry" (any pre-college student in the world can enter, as long as they have Internet access to see the problems). This year we continued to offer two divisions (one much less challenging than the other) into which students self-classified themselves. International participants often account for more than half of the total entries! Here's a quick table that summarizes participation for the 1999—2000 USACO season:
The participation from the USA in the first contests was of great concern to me. I knew I was recruiting one to two dozen new programmers for each contest, but the total number of USA contestants was not increasing. I finally went to investigate to see which contestants were returning for future contests and to see if any pattern was recognizable. The pattern was instantly and obviously clear. Those who score very, very low in a contest (e.g., scoring 80 out of 1,000 points) were quite likely to refrain from returning. Since this amounted to 10—25 contestants each time, the recruiting effort (magazine articles, newsgroups) was required to yield a couple dozen new entries just to stay even! Like a good marketer, I polled some members of the departing group and quickly found that they felt they need better training resources in order to compete with the world-class stars in the upper division. In January, Hal Burch and I set out to create the "USACO Training Pages." Using material from the previous camp, problems from a myriad of sources, and Russ Cox as a problem analyst, we have created roughly 200 hours of training material for our competitors. If you know pre-college programmers who would like to improve their contest programming ability, please send them to <https://ace.delos.com/usacogate>. The system includes sequencing, task grading, and a host of instructional materials on various algorithms. These pages are currently targeted at the student with a year or so of programming. We're working to extend them "down" to the novice level this year. The Training Pages have been discreetly announced through the USA since January. Over 300 pre-college students have tried at least some of the pages and the grader has evaluated 8,393 solution attempts submitted in both C/C++ and PASCAL. So far, it appears that the training pages are a super success and are creating students that, if this year's training camp is any indicator, are the equivalent of two training camps ahead of the game! Regrettably, I cannot attribute the improved U.S. Open attendance results solely to the training pages. We improved our public relations program for announcing the U.S. Open so much that determining the reason for the dramatic increase is not possible. The 1999—2000 Winners Ranking the winners across four separate contests, some of which were more challenging than others (e.g., the U.S. Open) is a daunting task. Consistency is an important factor; sometimes contestants "get lucky" once. Furthermore, the contests span the school year and the skill levels of the contestants change through the year. The 1999—2000 season saw a spectacular performance by Reid Barton, a home-schooled junior from Boston. He won two of the contests (one of them outright). John Danaher (one of the many talented students at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology located in Virginia) placed fifth, first, second, and fifth for a spectacular final year of eligibility. Sophomore Vladimir Novakovski, also a TJ student, earned a first and two seconds for the best performance in his age group. Veteran Percy Liang, a New Mexico student also in his final year, earned a first, second, and third. The U.S. Open yielded some surprising results. Senior Jack Lindamood, a contender throughout the year, was the only U.S. student to achieve a perfect score and thus earned the U.S. Open championship crown. In his spare time, Jack programs DSP chips for Texas Instru-ments. Only nine points behind, Thuc (sounds like "took") Vu captured second place. A junior, Thuc has been in the U.S. only eight months and is still mastering the English language! Below is a list of the students chosen to attend the USACO training.camp, an eight-day affair held just south of Milwaukee at the University of Wiscon-sin's Parkside branch.
The list contains a whopping seven students from TJHSST in Virginia, including identical twins Gary and Steven Sivek. We finally have a finalist from California, which is underrepresented in all our contests for no reason I can determine. Danaher, Liang, and Novakovski were our returning veterans. Four campers (Barton, Danaher, Liang, and Lu) earned a head start on this year's international competition at the Balkan Olympiad a couple of months ago. (See the July ;login: for an account of that competition.) Tomasz Czajka, a Polish veteran who won several USACO contests, was invited as our international representative this year. He provided stellar competition to our contestants in both formal and informal competitions. Training Camp Training camp has two direct goals: improve the skills of our top programmers and identify our four best candidates for gold medals at the international events throughout the rest of this season. Indirectly, the camp and its rewards provide goals for all US contestants throughout the competitive year. Contestants arrived at camp on Tuesday, June 20, and departed early on June 28. Two five-hour contest days highlighted the experiences, with dozens of instructional modules, problem attacks, and less formal exercises in between. This year we incorporated several parallel sessions with one coach/four students in an effort to increase personalized instruction and decrease the "Well, Joe knows the answer so I don't need to think" phenomenon. I think our effort was quite successful, and we'll continue this trend. We implemented Dynamic Program-ming Day, during which Russ Cox organized lectures, drills, lab problems, and even a set of eight different student presentations on dynamic programming. The presentations were stunning and the students nailed the DP problems on the first contest. The "training notebook," begun in earnest last year, grew to almost 150 pages of tutorials, drills, and programs. We're proud of this resource and believe it helps students throughout their competitive careers. This year's innovations included not only written solution analyses for the contest problems but also in-depth graphical analyses of the test data and its creation. Informal events included the Nine Men's Morris competition in which campers wrote programs that played against each other in the traditional English (and other) drinking game. Polish contestant Tomasz Czajka's program was undefeated. A (Frisbee-style) Disc Golf Competition was won by Jacob Burnim, while the traditional USACO Quiz Show was won by Gary Sivek, who edged out his twin brother Steven 2700-2400 in the final round. The first round of competition at the camp was an easier round with very high scores (mostly due to success on dynamic programming problems). For the second round, we cranked up the difficulty (see below). After Russ Cox graded all the problems and the group of coaches reviewed those scores and the finishes throughout the year, four students and one alternate were chosen for the international USACO traveling team. They are:
The next big contest is slated for late August in Cluj, Romania (in the state of Transylvania); the t-shirts will be fabulous. The international finals (IOI — International Olympiad on Informatics) will be held the last week of September in Beijing, China. The U.S. team carries with it high hopes for multiple gold medals. The Future It's just amazing how much time an endeavor such as this can take, especially once a publicly available set of Web pages is available. We plan to continue the set of individual contests on the Internet next year with the same style of divisions (or maybe even pseudo-divisions that let contestants evaluate themselves better in appropriate subgroups). This next year will be a milestone for the competitions, because we are finally leaving behind the 16-bit DOS-based compilers that have been de rigueur since the IOI's inception. These dinosaurs allow contestants access to only 640KB of memory and generate terribly slow code. I have chaired (I think I was the chair, anyway) a committee that is in charge of updating the technology. The current plan is to switch to GNU C/C++ and Free Pascal on the day after the IOI ends in China. The new compilers enable: automatic problem grading without the problems of rebooting DOS, file systems that might or might not become corrupted after each program execution, lack of multitasking, and lack of memory protection. This changes the landscape for available contest types and dramatically eases grading (i.e., IOI grading for 300 competitors should take closer to a fraction of an hour than the current 0.5 to 2 days). We're looking to grow the level of our competitions and the number of competitors throughout the next year. In order to foster computer programming as a more recognized sport, I'm looking at holding a set of dual meets (just like track, tennis, swimming, or football) through the school year. Each meet will pit one school's team against another's — even if the teams are proximal only via the Internet. It's an easy matter to conduct Web registration, offer a variety of scoring mechanisms (like swimming? tennis?) and team organizations (singles, doubles, etc.) to make some exciting competitions (probably more so for the contestants than the spectators). The parallelism that enables all the competitions to be just the same except for the competitors will be our little high-leverage secret. The problem-grading system used by the Web training pages has proven very reliable and amazingly efficient. Email responses are returned to the submitter often within just a couple of seconds. Opportunities A couple of items really need a large group focus in our effort. First of all, we need publicity. If you know students who might be interested in competing, please send them to <https://www.usaco.org> and <https://ace.delos.com/usacogate>. The USACO page shows some of the accomplishments of our team over the years and always contains up-to-date info on the latest contests and events. Second, we need additional programming tasks. These are a very special niche of problem type that require months (half a year? more?) to learn how to create. They suffer from the "Goldilocks Syndrome": they must not be too hard; they must not be too easy; they must be "just right." If you would like to help contribute to our "problem budget" (which could easily exceed 100 problems for the upcoming year), please contact me at <kolstad@ace.delos.com>. Acknowledgments and Thanks The USENIX Association's sponsorship of USACO is invaluable. Our time is spent creating contests, software, and educational opportunities instead of dressing up and begging for money. We're working hard to improve our program. Director Don Piele implements a huge number of tasks, including: the USACO Web page, administering the budget, acting as USENIX liaison, serving as camp operations manager, planning all physical plant items for camp (including transportation), and meals. He is like the genie in Aladdin's lamp: wish for something (a three-hole punch, for example) and it appears within hours. The four coaches (Brian, Greg, Hal, Russ) work with me throughout the year on problem creation, solution creation, test data creation, grading, and answering student questions from the training pages. All of our assistants donate their time (almost ten days at UW-Parkside just for training camp and its setup). It's a great group to work with and continues to create new and exciting ways to improve our camp. Thanks! Two Challenging Tasks Here's an easier problem (three stars out of four) created this year by Hal Burch. It is cowified to keep with the spirit of attending camp in Wisconsin: Cow TalkThis year's hardest problem (four stars) was "Kinergarten" (kine, you know, is an archaic plural for cow). This problem was couched in terms of a teacher taking the young calves on a field trip in which they each held on to a set of strings in order to avoid separating. After a good amount of verbiage, the problem devolves to: Kinergarten [Burch & Galperin, 2000]The problem, already quite challenging, is complicated by the fact that the total number doesn't fit in just a few bits, thus requiring the implementation of parts of a "bignum" package just to keep track of the final result. Conclusion The USACO is alive and well. Our camp participants thought the organization must have at least several dozen affiliates, given the Web pages, contests, and general "look and feel" of the public interface. This year was our most successful for increasing participation and raising the bar. The upcoming challenges are dominated by continuing to gain affiliates, maintain our quality, and prepare for the 2003 IOI, which is to be held in the USA. Our biggest challenge for 2003 is finding sponsors for the IOI. Thanks to the help of Hal Stern, Distinguished Engineer at SUN Microsystems, USENIX has received a donation of two Enterprise 250s, with dual 400MHz UltraSPARC II processors with 2MB cache, 8 256MB memory expansions for each, 2 internal 18.2GB 10,000 RPM drives, 19" color monitors, and Solaris 7 OS. This equipment will enable USENIX to replace its aging servers and generally improve performance both internally and externally. Thank you, Sun Microsystems!
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