How do you make the Nationalist Party win a general election with 43 MPs and then, by simply changing the electoral districts and not the voting patterns, transform the result into a Labour landslide with 47 MPs out of 65?

ICT university students have shown they know how to do it and last year came up with a simple software solution for electoral gerrymandering as part of a software coding competition.

The Castille Resources & ICTSA Programming Competition that will be held later on this month will once again separate skilful programmers from the artist programmers, according to Gordon Pace, lecturer in the Department of Computer Science in the Faculty of ICT at the University of Malta.

The event is being organised by the ICT Students' Association and the idea behind the programming challenge is to get students to work in teams, coding a solution to a problem over a weekend in the programming language of their choice.

"The main motivation behind the programming contest is to encourage students to enjoy the challenge of solving non-trivial programming problems," Mr Pace told i-Tech. "Many students take up an IT degree motivated by their passion for coding. Unfortunately, during most of the education process, students get to solve small, usually not so interesting problems. Even in their undergraduate and graduate projects, the focus is not on coding and enjoying the coding process, but on the solving of the problem.

"Although this is of great importance and value from an educational perspective, it is also important for students to have a context in which they express their love of programming, and showing off their technical excellence. This contest gives them the opportunity to live their passion for programming for 48 hours, consuming take-away pizzas, sleeping in shifts, giving them a way of comparing their skills with those of other coders, and inducing as many 'Eureka!' moments as possible."

The challenge for this year's competition will be published on February 26 at 8 p.m., with the deadline set for 48 hours later.

The competition has been held twice in the past, in 2005 and 2009 and the programming challenges have always been some form of optimisation problem, where the programme has to calculate a good solution within given constraints. For example, last year the problem was to distribute villages into voting districts to maximise the gains of one party in terms of elected Members of Parliament. Interestingly, the organisers ran the students' solutions on a problem based on the voting distributions from the Maltese local council elections results. The best programme managed to distribute the districts in such a way that when optimised to give an advantage to the Labour Party it managed to elect 47 out of 65 MPs, and when optimised to give better results for the Nationalist Party, it gave a result of 43 elected MPs - a swing of 25 seats!

Although the constraints were slightly relaxed with respect to the ones in the Maltese Constitution, it was interesting to note the good results that were achieved using a programme written over just 48 hours. Gerrymandering made too easy by computers, some observers might say.

"The type of problems posed in these challenges are those which involve smart thinking and intelligent solutions," added Mr Pace. "It is not a matter of knowing how to use technologies, but about being able to solve a challenging problem - usually the winners turn out to be the ones who think out-of-the-box. Learning how to use specific technologies is part of the apprenticeship in the craft of programming. Learning how to find and implement intelligent solutions to non-trivial problems is part of the process of learning the art of coding. There are craftsmen programmers and then there are the artists - this challenge is there for the latter." The issue of context for programmers is very important, according to Matthew Camilleri, director at Castille Resources Ltd, specialist in ICT and financial recruitment and main sponsor of the competition.

"On a technical level we rate local developers highly, however where we tend to excel is in the application of these skills within a business context. Our knowledge of English serves us well as does our commercial acumen. Our education system supports this and tends to generate a good range of skills from the university, vocational colleges and the private education system. The main challenge within the next few years will be to retain and improve the quality of our graduates while achieving the numbers required for growth. We will also need to specialise these skills further as mainstream development becomes more commoditised on an international level."

The competition comes at a time when Castille noted a slowdown in demand for software developers in 2009. However, the market has been recovering since, especially at the more experienced level, and Castille expects the market for these skills to return to pre-2008 levels of activity within the next six to12 months.

"Competitions such as this one do bring software development a little more to the fore after what has been a turbulent year for local perceptions on the future of the sector," added Mr Camilleri. "It is important we keep creating awareness about software development as a career to ensure we maintain graduate interest while also encouraging software developers to excel and develop their technical and business application skills further."

Details about this year's Castille Resources & ICTSA Programming Competition can be found at the competition website: www.cs.um.edu.mt/gordon.pace/Workshops/ICTSAPC2010.