A three-member Cornell student team will compete in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest, March 12-16, at Tokyo Disneyland Resort in Maihama, Japan. The students will compete among 88 teams from universities on six continents.

The Cornell students reached the contest by placing second in the Greater New York Regional Association ACM contest, Oct. 29, in Garden City, N.Y. Other Cornell teams also placed third and fifth.

The ACM contests give teams of three university students eight or more problems to solve, with a five-hour deadline. Each team is provided with a computer and access to several programming languages. The team that solves the most problems in the shortest time is the winner.

Problems assigned at the New York contest ranged from calculating change at a supermarket checkout to maximizing the number of margaritas that can be purchased with a given amount of money on the San Antonio River Walk. Cornell's second-place team solved eight of nine problems. The top-scoring team from Rutgers University solved the same eight problems just a few minutes faster, and Cornell's third-place team solved them a bit slower. A ninth problem, to format messages on highway signs, was not solved by any team.

Members of the Cornell team that will be going to Tokyo are: Nitin Gupta, Anand Bhaskar and Michael Cheng. The members of Cornell's two other teams in the regional contest were Hooyeon Lee, Yisong Yue, Vivek Maharajh, Ymir Vigfusson, Dustin Lee Harber and Changxi Zheng. Computer science graduate student Lars Backstrom is the coach. The team's participation was sponsored by Green Hills Software Inc. Morgasn Stanley is sponsoring the trip to Japan. IBM sponsors the contest worldwide. The world finals are hosted by IBM, Tokyo Research Lab and the ACM Japan Chapter.