Three Harvey Mudd College students, one of the teams considered “the cream of the crop,” earned an honorable mention at the 34th Annual World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) sponsored by IBM in Harbin, China.

Computer science majors Anak Yodpinyanee ’12, Stuart Pernsteiner ’12 and Daniel Fielder ’11—team HMC 42—finished 65th out of 103 teams after five hours of intense competition testing their computational problem-solving abilities.

Each team of three at the contest was presented with 11 problems. The team that solved the most problems correctly in the least amount of time was the winner. Shanghai Jiaotong University solved seven problems to capture this year’s championship. Teams from several American universities including Stanford, MIT and Carnegie Mellon University solved five problems each and tied for 14th place. The HMC team correctly solved three problems.

HMC won the ACM international competition in 1997. HMC is the only undergraduate institution—and the last U.S. institution—to have won the contest.

“I was ecstatic we finished where we did,” said Zachary Dodds, associate professor of computer science and the team adviser who accompanied the students on the week-long trip.

Each problem required the students to quickly develop an algorithm and employ that algorithm in their choice of programming language that solved the particular problem. For example, one question asked the students to build a solution to whether or not a particular size of chocolate bar could be shared among friends, who had various preferences for how large a piece of chocolate they wanted.

Dodds said the actual problem was the equivalent to something like allocating space on a circuit board or using a rectangular piece of plywood to build objects of various sizes.

“A lot of the problems were quite challenging to do but quite possible under the given constraints and time limits nevertheless,” said team member Fielder.

Unlike some of the questions at the Southern California regional competition, which were seemingly impossible to solve, every problem at the finals was solved by at least one team, Fielder said.

Dodds and Fielder agreed that the key to winning this particular competition is practice. Some teams practice intensely using the same contest format and the same constraints as those in the finals. HMC currently offers a one-unit problem-solving course and then the students do additional practice on their own time.

“Some universities feel these are really important skills and others feel they are wonderful skills but not crucial,” said Dodds, in explaining the emphasis some universities put on the competition. “We fall in the latter camp. These are wonderful skills to have, and we want our students to feel confident problem solving computationally. But as with any large-scale completion, there’s an elite crowd able to do it very well.”

The competition was preceded by four days of events including a formal opening ceremony in honor of the 103—out of more than 7,100 teams—who had made it to the finals. HMC was one of 21 teams from the U.S. to participate.

“I feel awfully fortunate to have worked with students so talented they actually brought me on their shoulders to China,” Dodds said.