A team of three computer programmers from Rutgers will compete in the world finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest in Tokyo next month. The team is one of 88 from around the world and 20 from the United States to participate in this year’s event.
The Rutgers team qualified for the IBM-sponsored Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest by winning first place in last October’s New York regional competition, besting teams from Columbia, Cornell, New York University, Princeton, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, SUNY-Stony Brook, and Yale.
The grueling regional competition pitted teams from 26 colleges and universities against each other to see who could solve up to nine complex programming tasks in five hours. In Tokyo, the finalists will be challenged to solve highly complex, real-world problems representing a semester’s worth of curriculum, such as ensuring secure business transactions over the internet or designing global positioning system navigation programs.
Members of the Rutgers team are Joseph Crobak, Adam Gashlin, and Marla Slusky. The team coaches are graduate students Bin Tian and Lei Wang, the faculty sponsor is Mario Szegedy, and the corporate sponsor is Ask.com.
Organizers describe the annual competition, to take place at the Hilton Tokyo Bay Hotel March 12 through March 16 as the world’s oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest, with roots extending back to 1970 at Texas A&M. Since that time, it has grown to encompass more than 6,000 teams from 1,756 universities around the world.
For more information on previous contests, final standings and problem sets, visit the contest Web site.