Three Cornell computer science students took first place in the Greater New York Regional Collegiate Programming Contest held Oct. 28 at Nassau Community College, Garden City, N.Y. Next March, the students -- Jeff Hoy '01, M.Eng. '02, Lars Backstrom '04 and Michael Conner '04 -- will compete in the 26th annual Collegiate Programming Contest finals in Honolulu, Hawaii, March 20-24.
Two Cornell teams placed first and second in the 1999 regional competition, and a single Cornell team took first place in the 1998 event. In the 2000 event, a Cornell team placed second.
The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is organized by the Association of Computing Machinery and sponsored by IBM. Thousands of teams from over 1,000 universities worldwide compete in regional contests, and 60 teams represent their regions at the world finals.
Cornell sent two teams: Team JLM consisted of Hoy Backstrom and Connor and team BFJ of Bill Barksdale '05, Frances Spalding '03 and Jacob Hoffman-Andrews '03. The teams were selected from participants in the Association of Computer Science Undergraduates programming contest on campus and trained by doctoral students Hubie Chen, David Kempe and Martin Pal. Green Hills Software financially supported the team for the training and trip to Long Island. The campus contest is open to students in any department; tryouts for next year's team will be held in the spring.
At the regional contest, 43 teams competed for five hours trying to solve as many problems as possible from a problem set of nine problems of varying difficulty. One of the more interesting problems asked teams to write a program that tests whether holes can be punched into a cube so that it will project three different patterns on a surface when light shines on its different faces.
In an exciting finish, Cornell's team JLM won the contest, solving seven problems and edging out Columbia University, which also solved seven problems but needed more total time to do so. Team BFJ from Cornell solved four problems, and ended in a very respectable 10th place.
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