A team of three Cornell undergraduates will be among 100 teams competing in the world finals of the 2009 Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest in Stockholm, April 18-22.

The team of Hooyeon "Haden" Lee '10, Eric First '09 and Vincent Chan '09 earned their place in the competition by placing second in the greater New York regional competition Oct. 26. The region is sending two teams to the finals this year. Worldwide, 7,109 teams from 1,838 universities in 88 countries entered regional competitions.

The contest pits teams of three university students against eight or more complex, real-world problems. They must write computer programs to solve the problems within a grueling five-hour deadline. Each incorrect solution submitted to the judges is assessed a time penalty. The team that solves the most problems in the fewest attempts in the least cumulative time is declared the winner. Last year's challenges included arranging air ducts to fit in a confined space, a game of hare and hounds, decoding a secret message and solving some math problems.

A Cornell team took first place in the previous ACM regional and went on to the world finals, and Cornell has placed in the top two in the regionals for the last three years. Unfortunately, the world finals have been dominated by teams from Russia for the last eight years, with occasional second- and third-place wins by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Cornell team will be accompanied to Stockholm by their coach, computer science graduate student Wei-Lung "Dustin" Tseng, a member of the Cornell team that advanced to the world finals last year. Their travel to Stockholm has been financed by Yahoo and the Cornell computer science department. Yahoo and Internet startup Chai Labs of Mountain View, Calif., contributed to training costs (largely pizza).

The ACM programming contest is the oldest, largest and most prestigious programming contest in the world. It has been an annual event since 1977, and since 1997 has been sponsored by IBM, which describes it as a "Battle of the Brains."