A three-student Cornell team finished first in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Greater New York Programming Contest, held Nov. 4 at Kean University in Union, N.J. The students will go on to compete against more than 80 other teams in the world finals in April in Banff Springs, Alberta, Canada.

Two other Cornell teams placed 11th and 16th out of the 48 teams competing. Teams from Princeton University placed second and third.

"Only four teams solved all nine of the problems, but ours did it in two-thirds the time of the next closest," said computer science graduate student Lars Backstrom, who coached the Cornell teams.

Last year, Cornell teams placed second, third and fifth in the regional contest.

In the ACM competitions, teams of three students are supplied with computers loaded with several programming languages and asked to write programs to solve a series of problems. The winner is the team that correctly solves the most problems in the shortest time. This year's problems ranged from simple unit conversions like pounds to kilograms and engineering problems like finding the height of a rocket from ground observations to the complex problem of finding out how many ways dominoes could be arranged in a given rectangular space.

Members of the winning Cornell team were Hooyeon Lee, Anand Bhaskar and Dustin Tseng. Members of the Cornell team that placed 11th were Vincent Chan, Ymir Vigfusson and Fred Howard; and the team that placed 16th included Vivek Maharajh, Vaibhav Goel and Ramu Nachiappan. Bhaskar was a member of last year's Cornell team that placed second in the regional competition and traveled to Tokyo for the world finals. Lee was a member of last year's Cornell team that placed third.

Team members are chosen through competition on campus, open to all students and not limited to computer science majors.

The regional contest is sponsored by IBM, AdaCore, Google and Two Sigma Investments.