Apr 15, 2011 - Claremont, Calif. -

The recent unrest in Egypt has prompted coordinators of an international collegiate programming contest to switch their World Finals from Sharm el-Sheik to Orlando, Fla. The Harvey Mudd College team, which won the Southern California Regional contest, is set to attend.

Affectionately known as the “Battle of the Brains,” the 35th Annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest will be held May 27-31, 2011 at the Peadbody Orlando Hotel and Conference Center.

Harvey Mudd College’s team, HMC 42—comprised of Daniel Fielder ’11, Stuart Pernsteiner ’12 and Anak Yodpinyanee ’12—will compete as one of 100 world finalist teams from around the globe.  The three computer science majors seized first place in the regional competition held last November in Riverside, Calif., by solving seven of eight total problems in a five-hour time limit.

The contest pits teams of three students against eight or more complex, real-world problems, with a grueling five-hour deadline. Huddled around a single computer, competitors race against the clock in a battle of logic, strategy and mental endurance. Teammates collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds, and build software systems that solve the problems under the intense scrutiny of expert judges.

Each year that one of HMC’s teams has placed first (1996, 1997, 1998, 2009 and 2010), it has represented the College at the international finals. The 1997 team of Brian Carnes ’97, Brian Johnson ’98, Kevin Watkins ’98 and Dominic Mazzoni ’99 (coached by Robert Keller, professor of computer science) won the international finals. In fact, HMC is the only undergraduate institution—and the last U.S. institution—to have won the contest, joining a list that includes MIT, Caltech, Waterloo, Stanford, and Harvard, among others.

Since IBM became sponsor in 1997, the contest has increased more than 800 percent. Participation has grown to involve 22,000 of the finest students and faculty in computing disciplines from more than 1,900 universities in 82 countries on six continents. The contest fosters creativity, teamwork, and innovation in building new software programs, and enables students to test their ability to perform under pressure. It is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest in the world.