A team of three Cornell computer science students placed 18th in a field of 62 teams in the 1999 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, held last month at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands.
Members of the Cornell team were Erik Dangremond, a senior in computer science; Mike Smullens, a junior in biology; and David Kempe, a first-year doctoral student in computer science.
"We were pretty happy with it," said Kempe. "We thought that if we were in the top half we would not lose face."
Adam Florence, a third-year graduate student in computer science who coached the team, added that the standing was particularly good in light of the fact that a Cornell team had never previously made it to the finals. "The 62 teams in the finals were chosen from 1,457 teams that entered regional contests, so you could say we were 18th out of 1,457," he said.
The Cornell team won the Greater New York Regional Collegiate Programming Contest, held at Bloomfield College in Bloomfield, N.J., on Nov. 8, 1998.
The finals consisted of eight programming problems that the teams were given five hours to solve. A typical problem presented the contestants with a relief map and information on rainfall and asked them to write a program predicting which areas would be flooded. The Cornell team solved four problems. The winning team from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, solved six.
Cornell's team was actually in first place early in the contest, Florence reported, being the first team to complete two problems. They remained in first place for about an hour, he said, until a team from the University of California at Berkeley solved a third problem.
Students interested in entering next year's contest are invited to contact either Florence or Kempe at the Department of Computer Science. The contest is open to all students, not just computer science majors, but is limited to undergraduates or first-year graduate students.
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