Jan 07, 2010 - Claremont, Calif. -

A Harvey Mudd College team won the Southern California regionals and is now headed to Harbin, China, where they will compete in the 34th Annual World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), sponsored by IBM.

Harvey Mudd is one of only 21 universities from the United States that have earned the opportunity to compete in World Finals this year. More than 7,100 teams, representing 1,830 universities from around the globe, battle for a coveted World Finals spot during the regional portion of the competition this fall—only 103 teams of three students will head to Harbin, February 1-5, 2010 where the contest will be hosted by Harbin Engineering University (HEU).

The finest problem solvers from all corners of the world will be challenged to solve eight to 10 complex, real-world problems—a semester's worth of curriculum—in just five hours. Problems range from designing an instant translation device to helping commuters get to work faster through mass transit systems. The team solving the most problems correctly in the least time will emerge as champions, earning scholarships, bragging rights and prizes from IBM.

Computer Science majors Anak Yodpinyanee '12, Stuart Pernsteiner '12 and Daniel Fielder '11—team HMC 42—bested 61 other teams at the regional contest, held at Riverside Community College Nov. 7. The three Mudders, each of whom have competed before in the ACM, led the contest for most of the five-hour, seven-problem event: they were the first team to solve one problem and the first to solve three problems. At the end of the event, they were the fastest of four teams that solved four of the contest's seven problems.

At the ACM contest, teams of three students use C, C++, or Java to solve six to eight problems within five hours. One machine is provided to each team, leaving one or two team members free to work out an approach. Success often depends on deciding which problems to attack first. The problems test the identification of underlying algorithms as much as programming savvy and speed and cover a wide range of application areas: business data processing, engineering, text handling, process optimization, and more. Many emulate the kinds of problems one might be presented with in industry; some of them are actual industrial problems. The problems the HMC team solved dealt with determining the length of a serpentine belt around a set of pulleys, calculating the results of a series of sports parlay wagers, and finding distances through or around a city grid surrounded by open space.

Zach Dodds, professor of computer science and ACM coach for 10 years, said that the HMC 42 team is remarkably talented. "They work very smoothly together, each complementing the others," he said. Fielder, the oldest member of the team, agreed.

"This team strikes a great balance between working so similarly that we all get stuck on the same problem, and working so differently that we can't help each other at all,” Fielder said. “Anak and Stewart are both extremely talented programmers with lots of contest experience, so that's obviously extremely helpful. We're just different enough that all of us together is better than any one of us individually.”

Fielder said that this year's contest was more algorithmically challenging than previous years. “The last few years have had a bunch of problems that are trivial to see a solution to, but agonizing to code. This year was mercifully light on those, which really played to our team's strengths,” he said.

Examining the team's strengths and weaknesses will be part of the preparation for the ICPC finals. Dodds says that a key skill in the competition is determining which problems are most likely solvable and which are too complex to be solved within the time limit. The HMC team is fortunate to have the counsel of alumnus Don Chamberlain ’66, a longtime judge at the ICPC finals, 2003 Outstanding Alumni Award recipient (HMC) and winner of the 2009 Fellow Award from the Computer History Museum. Dodds said Chamberlain has provided recent finals problems and submission statistics that will help build intuition about what kinds of problems warrant the team's effort and attention.

Fielder said that he will be studying USA Computing Olympiad materials over winter break and will probably work with the team on coding. “To compete in China, it would really help if we were able to write programs more quickly, so we'll be working on that too," he said. "Anak in particular, is great at coming up with his own test cases for our code, so I intend to practice that as well so I can contribute more on the testing side of things."

In addition to HMC 42, three other HMC teams competed in the regional contest:

HMC Hammer: Josh Ehrlich ’11, Aaron Pribadi ’13, Daniel Lubarov ’12 (9th place)
HMC Escher: Jackson Newhouse ’13, Ryan Brewster ’12 (12th place)
HMC Alien: Michael Leece ’11, Alejandro Lopez-Lago ’11, Chris Sauro
’11 (13th place)

Each year that one of Mudd's teams has placed first (1996, 1997 and 1998), it has gone on to represent the college at the international finals. In 1997, Harvey Mudd's 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.

Go to: Full standings of the 2009 Southern California regional contest.