A team of Rutgers students captured first place in a grueling competition held October 29 to see who could solve up to nine complex computer programming tasks in five hours. The event, a regional meet in the International Collegiate Programming Contest, pitted teams from 26 area colleges and universities against each other.
The winning Rutgers team, one of three teams participating from the university, bested teams from Cornell, Princeton and Yale, all of which finished in the top 10. The Rutgers team was also one of only three teams to complete eight problems. No team solved all nine, and the others solved between two and seven.
Other prestigious competitors in the New York regional competition held at Nassau Community College in Garden City, N.Y., included Columbia University, New York University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and SUNY-Stony Brook.
With its victory, the Rutgers team qualifies to participate in the world championships in Tokyo in March 2007. The selection of 85 finalists awaits completion of all regional rounds, which run through December.
Members of the victorious Rutgers team were Joseph Crobak, Marla Slusky and Adam Gashlin. Participants in the other two Rutgers teams were Jun Dai, Derek Mauro, Baiyang Liu, Ryan Weiss, Eric Rivas and James Hsu. Coaching the Rutgers teams were Bin Tian and Lei Wang, teaching assistants in computer science, and the faculty sponsor was Mario Szegedy, a professor of computer science.
The annual competition is run by the Association for Computing Machinery and sponsored by IBM. Organizers claim it is the world’s oldest, largest and most prestigious programming contest, with roots extending back to a 1970 competition at Texas A&M.