Programmers Destroy MIT At Regionals

Three Harvard students topped the field Saturday at an intercollegiate computer programming contest, tripling MIT's score and beating the second-place finisher by three problems in a seven problem set.

Matthew S. Caywood '99, Russell S. Cox '01 and Elliot Shmukler '00 will now advance from the regional to the international level, traveling to Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in April for the final competition.

Writing a computer-voting program to calculate the winner of an election was one of seven problems on the agenda for the 12 teams of students from New England and parts of Canada Who Competed at Westfield State College in Massachusetts.

Each team had five hours and one computer to solve the problems. The Harvard team answered six questions correctly. The Rochester Institute of Technology, which will also advance to the finals, solved three.

"I wasn't expecting us to win by that kind of margin," said Caywood, who has been on the team for three years. "We were really expecting [MIT] to be much better competition. We motivated ourselves by saying `All right, We're going to beat MIT this time.'"

Shmukler, who is also a Crimson executive, explained that in these competitions teams can never be sure of victory before time runs out.

"We got ahead pretty quickly, but incompetitions like this, things can change withinthe span of an hour very drastically," he said."For instance. I think one team got three problemswithin the span of an hour, so we knew that we hadto keep up our rate of work all the time." This isShmukler's second year on the team.

The team's novice member, Cox, said the team"collaborated" well together and, through groupwork, made efficient use of the five hours. Thethree students-who were chosen two weeks ago intryouts run by veteran members and teamalumni-practiced three days last week for a totalof 15 hours.

Cox said the difficulty level of the problemswas evenly distributed.

"It was a very good competition as far as thedifficulty of the problems." Cox said. "No one gotall the problems."

The Harvard team failed to answer a problemasking them to devise a program to list possibleconfigurations of carbon atoms in organicchemistry molecules.

The teams could decide between three differentprogramming languages; Pascal, C and C++. TheHarvard team uses a combination of C and C++.

"C is very convenient for this kind ofcontest," Caywood said. "It's a dirty sort oflanguage."

Last weekend in the preliminary round, Harvardcame in second behind MIT.

A Harvard team won the internationalcompetition in 1993 when it was held inIndianapolis, Ind. Last year, Charles Universityin Prague led the pack.

The team members said they are enthusiasticabout their upcoming trip to northern Europe.

"I think it's a lot fun. I mean, it's far awayfrom Harvard, it's international and the finalsare really cool," said Shmukler. "They bringtogether about 54 teams from all over theworld...the best programming minds in the worldare there. It's a lot of fun."

Leather jackets with the IBM logo also camewith the first place finish. IBM sponsored theevent, which is run by the Association forComputing machinery (ACM), the world's oldest andlargest scientific computing society.

"They actually do a lot of recruiting at thesecompetitions," Shmukler said. "Even at theregional level, before we were actually allowed tobegin the competition, an IBM recruiter gave alittle speech, highlighting why IBM was so goodand telling us that if we had any questions aboutworking for them we could always talk to him.

"We got ahead pretty quickly, but incompetitions like this, things can change withinthe span of an hour very drastically," he said."For instance. I think one team got three problemswithin the span of an hour, so we knew that we hadto keep up our rate of work all the time." This isShmukler's second year on the team.

The team's novice member, Cox, said the team"collaborated" well together and, through groupwork, made efficient use of the five hours. Thethree students-who were chosen two weeks ago intryouts run by veteran members and teamalumni-practiced three days last week for a totalof 15 hours.

Cox said the difficulty level of the problemswas evenly distributed.

"It was a very good competition as far as thedifficulty of the problems." Cox said. "No one gotall the problems."

The Harvard team failed to answer a problemasking them to devise a program to list possibleconfigurations of carbon atoms in organicchemistry molecules.

The teams could decide between three differentprogramming languages; Pascal, C and C++. TheHarvard team uses a combination of C and C++.

"C is very convenient for this kind ofcontest," Caywood said. "It's a dirty sort oflanguage."

Last weekend in the preliminary round, Harvardcame in second behind MIT.

A Harvard team won the internationalcompetition in 1993 when it was held inIndianapolis, Ind. Last year, Charles Universityin Prague led the pack.

The team members said they are enthusiasticabout their upcoming trip to northern Europe.

"I think it's a lot fun. I mean, it's far awayfrom Harvard, it's international and the finalsare really cool," said Shmukler. "They bringtogether about 54 teams from all over theworld...the best programming minds in the worldare there. It's a lot of fun."

Leather jackets with the IBM logo also camewith the first place finish. IBM sponsored theevent, which is run by the Association forComputing machinery (ACM), the world's oldest andlargest scientific computing society.

"They actually do a lot of recruiting at thesecompetitions," Shmukler said. "Even at theregional level, before we were actually allowed tobegin the competition, an IBM recruiter gave alittle speech, highlighting why IBM was so goodand telling us that if we had any questions aboutworking for them we could always talk to him.