March 3, 1997
Top computer science students from Stanford, MIT and Harvard were no match for a team of three University of Washington students who were runners up at the Association for Computing Machinery's annual International Collegiate Programming Contest on Sunday March 2 in San Jose, Calif.
"Our team finished a close second out of an initial field of more than 1,000, besting teams from essentially every major university in the world," said Ed Lazowska, chairman of the UW Department of Computer Science & Engineering. "This is really a fantastic accomplishment."
The UW team and a team from the University of Queensland in New Zealand tied for second place behind Harvey Mudd College, an elite undergraduate engineering school in southern California. Trailing behind were teams from many of the top universities in the United States as well as Russia, Korea, China, Taiwan, Canada, and about 15 other countries.
Representing the UW were Computer Science & Engineering undergraduates Yih-Chun Hu and Chris Prince and graduate student Doug Zongker. Corey Anderson, also a graduate student, was the team coach, and Professor Dan Weld served as faculty adviser.
To get to the International competition, the UW squad first beat out 43 other teams at the Pacific Regional contest held in late November in Seattle. The top two to three teams from each of 20 regional contests held around the world went on to the International finals in San Jose, which were sponsored by Microsoft. (UW and Stanford -- the runner-up in the Pacific Regional contest -- advanced to the International competition from the Pacific Regionals. Other outstanding universities such as Berkeley and UBC failed to make it past the tough competition in the Pacific Regionals.)
On Sunday, the 50 finalist teams assembled in an exhibit hall in the San Jose Convention Center to match wits. Each team, armed with a single desktop PC and whatever reference materials they could carry, was given five hours to solve eight programming problems. A dull roar of tense whispers and clicking keyboards filled the room as contestants tackled such challenges as translating a message of garbled Morse code and developing a spreadsheet program.
Teams were ranked by the number of problems they solved correctly. Among teams that solved the same number of problems, ranking was determined by the least number of penalty points. One penalty point was assessed for each minute a team took to solve each problem, and 20 penalty points were assessed for each incorrect solution submitted. (If the judges rejected an initial solution, teams were allowed to try again.)
The UW squad was among six teams who solved six problems and, along with the University of Queensland team, collected 916 penalty points -- just 16 points behind first place Harvey Mudd College. Other universities who finished in the top 10, in descending order, were: National Taiwan University; University of Waterloo, Ontario; Umea University, Sweden; Comenius University, Bratislavia; St. Petersburg State University, Russia; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Complete standings are here.
The UW students credit the Department of Computer Science & Engineering's emphasis on applied algorithms and software, as well as helpful pre-contest training sessions led by Anderson, for the team's strong showing.
"I think that the department's strong emphasis on applied algorithms helped us quickly design programs which worked well," Hu said. "I felt really blessed to have done so well, though I felt a little disappointed because the margin between us and first place was so small."
Prince added, "It was quite an honor to compete against other top schools in the world, including MIT, Caltech, and Harvard. We were extremely pleased with the outcome of the contest, and the fact that our hard work had paid off."