A Cornell team finished second in the 2008 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Regional Programming Contest for the greater New York region Oct. 26 at St. Joseph's College in Patchogue, N.Y. And Hooyeon "Haden" Lee '10, a member of that team, advanced to the finals in the Google Code Jam, to be held at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Nov. 14.

Cornell fielded three teams of three students each in the ACM competition, in which contestants were given a list of eight problems to solve in five hours. The team that solved the most problems in the least time won. Cornell Team 1 -- Eric First '09, Vincent Chan '09 and Lee -- solved seven problems and held first place until just 12 minutes before the end of the contest, when a team from SUNY Stony Brook solved the eighth problem.

A Cornell team took first place in the ACM regional last year, and Cornell has placed in the top two for the last three years.

Team 2 -- graduate student Viktor Russev Ivanov, Yu Cheng '12 and Ramu Nachiappan '09 -- completed six problems to place eighth. Team 3 -- Seulgi Kim '12, Jae Yong Sung '12 and Jonghwi Lee '10 -- completed four problems to place 15th. Dustin Tseng, a third-year Ph.D. candidate, coached the teams. Overall standings were better than last year, Tseng noted, even though the teams included many "rookies" who had never been in the contest before.

The Google Code Jam similarly presents competitors with problems to be solved by writing a computer program within a prescribed time, but began with online rounds to pare down a list of almost 7000 entrants. Lee and doctoral student Lars Backstrom survived three rounds of online competition to qualify for the local onsite round held in New York City, Sept. 29. There Lee placed 23rd among the top 100 in the Americas region, all of whom will proceed to the finals.