Programming Puzzles at CMU

A few years ago, the Computer Science Department at Carnegie-Mellon University regularly ran a small programming contest for its incoming graduate students. The contest was intended to give the new researchers some hands-on experience with the department systems and let them demonstrate their star potential. CMU has a long and distinguished involvement with computers, stretching back to the pioneering days, so you'd typically expect some outstanding entries in a programming competition there.

The form of the contest varied from year to year, and in one particular year it was very simple. Contestants had to read a file of numbers and print the average. There were only two rules:

  1. The program had to run as fast as possible.
  2. The program had to be written in Pascal or C.

The rival programs were grouped together and submitted in batches by a faculty member. Students could submit as many entries as they wished; this encouraged the use of non-deterministic probabilistic algorithms (algorithms that would guess at certain characteristics of the data set and use the guess to obtain faster performance). The golden rule was that the program which ran in the
shortest amount of time won the contest. The graduate students duly retired to dark corners and started whacking their various programs. Most of them had three or four versions to enter and run. At this point, the reader is invited to guess the techniques that helped the programs run fast.


Most people guess the biggest wins will come through code optimization, either explicitly in the code, or implicitly by using the correct compiler options. The standard code optimizations are techniques like loop unrolling, in-line function expansion, common subexpression elimination, improved register allocation, omitting runtime checks on array bounds, loop-invariant code motion, operator strength reduction (turning exponentiation into multiplication, turning multiplication into bit-shifting and/or addition), and so on.

The data file contained about 10,000 numbers, so assuming it took a millisecond just to read and process each number (about par for the systems at the time), the fastest possible program would take about ten seconds.

The actual results were very surprising. The fastest program, as reported by the operating system, took minus three seconds. That's right—the winner ran in a negative amount of time! The next fastest apparently took just a few milliseconds, while the entry in third place came in just under the expected 10 seconds. Obviously, some devious programming had taken place, but what and how? A detailed scrutiny of the winning programs eventually supplied the answer. The program that apparently ran backwards in time had taken advantage of the operating system. The programmer knew where the process control block was stored relative to the base of the stack. He crafted a pointer to access the process control block and overwrote the "CPU-time-used" field with a very high value. The operating system wasn't expecting CPU times that large, and it misinterpreted the very large positive number as a negative number under the two's complement scheme.

A flagrant abuse of the rules, ranking equal to the time Argentinian soccer ace Diego Maradona used his forearm to nudge the ball into the England net for the winning goal in the 1986 soccer World Cup.

The runner-up, whose program took just a few milliseconds, had been equally cunning in a different way. He had used the rules of the competition rather than exotic coding. He submitted two different entries. One entry read the numbers, calculated the answer in the normal way, and wrote the result to a file; the second entry spent most of its time asleep, but woke up briefly every few seconds and
checked if the answer file existed. When it did, it printed it out. The second process only took a few milliseconds of total CPU time. Since contestants were allowed to submit multiple entries, the smaller time counted and put him in second place.

The programmer whose entry came in third, taking slightly less than the calculated minimum time, had the most elaborate scheme. He had worked out the optimized machine code instructions to solve the problem, and stored the instructions as an array of integers in his program. It was easy to overwrite a return address on the stack (as Bob Morris, Jr. later did with the Internet worm of 1988) and cause the program to jump into and start executing this array. These instructions solved the problem honestly in record time.

There was an uproar among the faculty when these stratagems were uncovered. Some of the staff were in favor of severely reprimanding the winners. A younger group of professors proposed instead awarding them an extra prize in recognition of their ingenuity. In the end, a compromise was reached. No prizes were awarded, no punishments were handed down, and the results stuck. Sadly, the contest
was a casualty of the strong feelings, and this incident marked the final year it was held.

Expert C Programming - Deep C Secrets, Peter van der Linden, 1994. ISBN: 0131774298

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Pub: 06 Apr 2023 17:13 UTC
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