Carnegie Mellon Team Will Compete in Programming World Finals in Japan

Byron SpiceWednesday, November 15, 2006

A team of freshmen and sophomore computer science students will be headed to Japan next spring to represent Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science in the World Finals of the 31st ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.

Sophomores Young Sub Bae and Nate Bauernfeind and freshman Lawrence Tan, competing as the "Tartans," earned their trip to Japan and the so-called "Battle of the Brains" by placing second among 116 teams from 64 schools Saturday during a regional competition at the University of Cincinnati.

Also among the top performers at the Cincinnati regional was Carnegie Mellon's other team, the Dragons, which included juniors Jeffrey Schroder and Andrew Warshaver and freshman Daegun Won. The Dragons placed 5th among the teams.

"Having one highly ranked team is a tremendous achievement," said coach Greg Kesden, a lecturer in the Computer Science Department. "Having two so highly ranked teams is amazing." It also is a curse, he added; the Dragons' performance almost certainly would have earned them a spot in the World Finals, but each school can send only one team to the World Finals.

A University of Toronto team placed first in the regional competition. Teams from the University of Waterloo placed third and fourth.

The competition requires students to use their programming skills to solve complex, real-world problems within a grueling five-hour deadline. In addition to Toronto and Waterloo, the Carnegie Mellon teams faced stiff competition from teams representing Ohio University and Purdue University.

"These underclassmen were truly amazing," Kesden said of the Tartan team. "In their first year competing, they defeated not only Carnegie Mellon's own upper-classmen team, but also teams consistering of upperclassmen and graduate students from all across the region."

In addition to Kesden, the Carnegie Mellon coaches are Eugene Fink, systems scientist, and Betty Cheng, a doctoral student in the Language Technologies Institute.

About 85 teams from schools across the globe will compete in the World Finals, March 12 to 16 at the Hilton Tokyo Bay in Maihama, Japan.

For More Information

Byron Spice | 412-268-9068 | bspice@cs.cmu.edu