A team of three computer science students from Cornell University will compete with 62 teams from six continents in the finals of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest, April 8-12, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

Winners of the 23rd annual competition, the world's largest programming contest, will earn scholarships as well as bragging rights. This year's competition, sponsored by IBM and held at the Technical University of Eindhoven, marks the first time the world finals will be held outside the United States.

Members of the Cornell team are 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 are all really excited about being allowed to go to Eindhoven and represent Cornell," Kempe said.

To qualify for the finals, the Cornell team won the ACM Greater New York Regional Collegiate Programming Contest, held at Bloomfield College in Bloomfield, N.J., on

Nov. 8, 1998.

There were seven problems in the five-hour regional contest at Bloomfield, tackled by teams from colleges and universities in parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Cornell's was the only team to solve all seven problems, and it did so after only four hours. Each team in the contest was supplied with two Pentium computers and given a list of problems to solve. They could write their programs in C/C++, Pascal or Ada languages. The simplest problem, Kempe said, was to find a match for a given phone number in a list of area codes. The most difficult, and the one that won the contest for Cornell, was to merge two very long character strings according to certain rules.

"We got that right and that made us win over Columbia," Kempe said.

Columbia University came in second in the regional contest.

The Cornell team, coached by third-year graduate student Adam Florence, was chosen by a competition among students in the Cornell computer science department.

ACM is an international scientific and educational organization dedicated to advancing the arts, sciences, and applications of information technology. It is the world's oldest and largest educational and scientific computing society, with over 80,000 members worldwide.

This is the first time Cornell has won the ACM Regional Contest since teams from Cornell began to participate in the early 1990s. This year's team was sponsored by Green Hills Software of Santa Barbara, Calif.

Cornell Computer Science Department: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/