WOBURN CHALLENGE VII Hello! If you're reading this, chances are you were at this year's Woburn Challenge, the seventh year that we ran the Challenge. The Woburn Challenge was initially created by Peter Plachta - some would call him a visionary, others would just say he was looking for a challenge. It was first held in the December of 1995, as a competition between Woburn's Programming Enrichment Group (PEG) and the PCs from UofT Scarborough. Since then, it has evolved into a huge competition between high school and university teams. This year, the competition featured 40 teams, with competitors from U of T, Queen's University and MIT. Indeed, we have progressed to the point where we received sponsorship from IBM, and UofT Scarborough again graciously donated their labs for our competition. The intent of the competition in the past few years has been to expose high school students to a variety of new topics; topics that they normally would not see until University. At the same time, the competition was intended to challenge everyone who competes, including University students, with some fiendishly difficult problems! It is our hope that in providing this disk to you, with all of the competition material from this year, we are facilitating the learning experience of your team. We sincerely hope that you can benefit from our efforts. When the event like this one is organized there are many volunteers working behind the scenes to make it happen. Traditionally, there have been few opportunities to acknowledge the efforts of those involved in making the Woburn Challenge a reality. However, I'd like to take this opportunity to mention the names of those who made this year's Challenge a success. First and foremost, there is Maria Plachta, the leader of Woburn's PEG, without whom, we are lost. The countless hours she has devoted to make this event a success should not be overlooked, and we thank her. Next, there is Peter Plachta, who graciously agreed to help out once again this year. Peter is basically the guy we turn to with all our questions, and he has not disappointed us. This year, he looked after the Suicidal division, and dealt with various our incompetencies. Next, Rachel Chang composed almost all of the test data for the Int/Snr divisions, as well was as looking after the administrativia for the event; we thank her for her time and efforts. David Pritchard, who, as in past years, wrote all of the solutions for the Intermediate and Senior divisions once again this year, so we thank him for this. Aly Merchant composed data for Suicidal as well as writing an Auto-Judge that was used at the competition. David "Tiny" Zhang, assisted in the creation of problems in Int/Snr, and also made some test data. Kathy Plachta and COUNTLESS members of PEG assisted with the administrative details of the competition, arranging food, etc. We thank them all. We would like to thank our sponsors : the Computer Center of the Scarborough Campus for offering their labs, the Physical Sciences Department for taking care of our parking expenses, and arranging a lecture room for our use, and IBM for graciously donating their prizes. I would like to mention in particular Radek Januszewski who has been our technical support for the last three years, judges: Kelly Lyons - IBM, Nick Cheng - Computer Science department, and Dave Lau - Research in Motion. We hope you enjoyed the Challenge. We're on hiatus now, but we might be back, better than ever... Mohammed Ajmal Director Woburn Challenge VII P.S. (by Peter) and Mohammed Ajmal deserves a lot of credit for being a most competent director!! Downloader failed! Response object 006~ASP 0159~Buffering Off~Buffering must be on.