04/18/2023
April is Pride Month at NDSU, and to celebrate the computer science department recently participated and won the "student choice" category in the campus-wide office decorating contest. The goal of the competition is to have a more visually inclusive campus environment leading up to National Day of Silence on April 14th. The department chose to honor the founder of computer science, Alan Turing, an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist.Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Turing was homosexual, for this sole reason, he was arrested in 1952 for indecency. He was chemically castrated and had developed a depression that might have caused his suicide. This tragic fate is a classic example of how society’s prejudice robbed him of a dignified and fulfilling life. Let us not forget this tragic example and keep fighting to promote a more egalitarian culture in honor of Turing’s and so many lives wasted to intolerance.  Stop by the department this month to view the decorations and celebrate Pride with us!

03/02/2023
NDSU was a site host for the 2023 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Facilitated by Senior Lecturer Joseph Latimer, teams from NDSU, Bemidji State, and MSUM competed in the five hour event. NDSU Computer Science teams had a strong showing in our region of 116 teams, with the team of Elijah Satrom, Jean Eckelberg, and Eathon Jablon placing 11th, newcomers Brady Vogt, Andrew Fergel, and Colin Campbell placing 12th, and the team of Carson Miller, Brandon Gasser, and William Saksoda placing 37th.

The International Collegiate Programming Contest is an algorithmic programming contest for college students. Teams of three, representing their university, work to solve the most real-world problems, fostering collaboration, creativity, innovation, and the ability to perform under pressure. Through training and competition, teams challenge each other to raise the bar on the possible. It is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest in the world.

The contest fosters creativity, teamwork, and innovation in building new software programs, and enables students to test their ability to perform under pressure. The contest has raised aspirations and performance of generations of the world’s problem solvers in the computing sciences and engineering.

02/22/2023
Mama Mia! Can you cook the best pizza's faster than the competition? This kitchen is only big enough for the best! That was the theme of this year’s Byte-le Royale, hosted by the NDSU student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The 12-hour programming competition challenges competitors in teams of up to 3 to write an AI to play a video game and compete against each other to see who can create the best AI. The “Papa Rivard’s” team of Elijah Satrom, Enoch Satrom, and Chris Tupper took first place, “No llambda's” Brandon Gasser and William Soksoda took second, “IntelliBeans” Brennan Gerstner finished third, and “SIMS” Jace Weishaar and Mason Myles took fourth. Additionally, the team “Fan Mention” made up of Jack Hance, Matthew Tassava, and Cameron Kolodjski were the graduate team winners.

This was the first competition for NDSU computer science sophomore Ian King. “For the first time competing, it was a lot of fun. I'm still learning a lot about programing being new to computer science, so it was a bit overwhelming, but it was fun in the sense that like, okay, let's see what we can do and then we'll see what happens in the end. The ACM did have a meeting beforehand introducing Python and that personally really helped me, and the competition was a big help with getting better with coding. I definitely want to partake in more competitions in the future.”

First place winner Elijah Satrom says it was definitely worth the effort, with each of the first-place team members winning $456. “It’s fairly easy to get into as long as you have a basic grasp of programing, logic and such. The API to interact with the game was very easy to use and it was fairly well documented. It was definitely a fun experience and for a 12-hour competition it was very well-designed. No one's going to be closing out the competition with that feeling of, well, I've been working on stuff for 12 hours and I still did almost nothing. It's a good middle ground for the amount of time you have and there was still stuff at the end that we could get done. I'd say it was very well put together.”

Second place winner Braddon Gasser added “the first hour of it is always really stressful. You get the game, you get the manual and you've got no idea what to do. This was my fourth AI competition, and it's pretty fun. Even if you don't win, it's a good time.”

The current chair of the ACM Amanda Fetzer stated that development of the game takes close to a year. “Additionally, we did do a bit of game balancing during gameplay because we noticed some parts of the code we thought were working weren't. But we kind of gave ourselves a rule where we can do game balancing within the first half, but then after that we just don't touch the code because then otherwise it won't give teams enough time to adjust to those changes. There were five updates and only one of them was balancing in the first couple of hours.”

The ACM has been hosting the event since 2018 with the initial computational infrastructure built by computer science alum Jordan Goetze. The AI competition is a very well kept secret each year, which means that the objective and structure of the each year’s game are not revealed until the day of the event. You can learn more about the competition, including previous gameplay at the ACM website.

01/11/2023
NDSU freshman Conor Quinn won first place in the cybersecurity “Scavenge-The-Flag” competition at the BSides Dallas-Fort Worth conference in Texas. NDSU junior Cayden Schmandt also took second place in a physical cybersecurity competition at the conference.

The “Scavenge-The-Flag” competition combined cybersecurity knowledge questions with scavenger hunt activities and in-person challenges. The physical security competition included several challenges related to locks and lockpicking.

“It was a very informative conference. The speakers were very knowledgeable and taught about some interesting attacks. It really expanded my knowledge of various aspects of cybersecurity,” said Schmandt. “It was an overall fun conference. I’m glad that we were able to bring a large group of freshmen and to get them more excited about cybersecurity and broaden their knowledge.”

BSides conferences are held around the world. The BSides conference in Dallas-Fort Worth has been held annually for more than a decade. Read more