Teams of Cornell computer science students took both first and second place in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Greater New York Regional Programming Contest held Nov. 7 at the United States Military Academy, West Point, N.Y. The winning Cornell teams were known as Big Red 1 and Big Red 2; Big Red 1 will go on to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals in Orlando, Fla., March 15-19, 2000.

More than 2,300 teams of students compete in similar regional events worldwide. Of those, a total of 58 teams will advance to the international contest. The top 10 teams will be awarded scholarships and other prizes.

A single team from Cornell also won last year’s regional competition, and placed 18th in a field of 62 teams in the international finals. This is the first time Cornell has sent two teams to the regional competition since it began to participate in the early 1990s.

Thirty-nine teams from colleges and universities in parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, and one team from Montreal, competed in this year's regional event. Each team was given a list of eight problems that could be solved by writing computer programs. The problems ranged from manipulating mathematical expressions to such challenges as plotting the movement of an ant walking around the inside of a box and predicting the appearance of a Rubik's cube after certain rotations.

The Big Red 1 team was the only one in the competition to solve seven of the eight problems. Big Red 2 solved six. The third-place team, from Concordia College of Montreal, Canada, solved only five, as did five other teams. Scoring is based first on the number of problems solved and then on the time used. The overall time limit of the contest is five hours.

Big Red 1 is made up of Hubie Chen, a first-year Ph.D. student in computer science, and undergraduates Gun Srijuntongsiri '02 and Jacob Hoffman-Andrews '03. Members of the second-place team, Big Red 2, are Kang-Hoe Kim, a first-year Ph.D. student, and undergraduate

Jed Liu '01 and Joel Chestnutt '02. The undergraduates are either computer science majors or underclassmen who plan to major in computer science. The teams were coached by Adam Florence and David Kempe, both Ph.D. students in computer science. Kempe was a member of the Cornell team that won the regional contest in 1998, and Florence was its coach.

Team members are chosen through competition on campus. "Although they all happened to be computer science students, the competition is open to anyone in any department," Kempe said. Tryouts for next year’s teams will be held in the spring, with prizes given for the local winners. Students interested in participating should contact Kempe at kempe@cs.cornell.edu or Florence at aflorenc@cs.cornell.edu.

ACM is an international scientific and educational organization dedicated to advancing the arts, sciences and applications of information technology. The ACM collegiate programming contest, sponsored by IBM, is in its 24th year. The teams were sponsored by Green Hills Software Inc. of Santa Barbara, Calif.

Related World Wide Web sites:

• Association for Computing Machinery: http://www.acm.org/
• Greater New York Region page about the contest, with descriptions of the problems and team standings:
• http://www.cs.cornell.edu/acm
• Cornell's Computer Science department: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/cucs/index.htm