On Monday nights, Deschutes Hall is nearly deserted, with only the click-clack sounds of a keyboard emitting from a small room and filling the empty hallways.
Inside that room, three University students sit in silence. Two stare at a packet of problems that lay before them; the third types at a rapid speed, stopping only to turn the pieces of paper in front of him.
After 20 minutes, the silence is
interrupted.
“This is a good problem set,” University senior James Marr says.
Marr is one of three members of Buffleheads, which also includes Dan Stutzbach and Carl Howells. The three computer-savvy students formed the team last year, intent on competing in a regional computer programming contest sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery.
The top two teams from each region are invited to the international finals, which includes students from Africa, Europe and the South Pacific.
After placing 13th in last year’s regional contest, the members of the Buffleheads worked together and swept this year’s competition, taking first place. Only 70 out of 3,850 competing teams will attend the international competition.
“It was something of an accomplishment,” Marr said. “I’m rather proud of it.”
The international competition, officially titled the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, pits each team against a grueling five-hour deadline as they work to solve eight complex problems. Members of each team must work together to write a computer program that implements the solution. According to ACM officials, tackling the problems is equivalent to completing a semester’s worth of computer programming in one afternoon.
After a team believes it has a working version of the program, they submit it to the judges, who run the program with sample data to test its accuracy. The team’s score is based on how many problems are completed, the time it took to complete the problems and the number of incorrect solutions submitted.
During the regional competition, the members of the Buffleheads were the only team to finish their entire problem set with time to spare, impressing judges and spectators.
Professor Eugene Luks, an adviser to the Buffleheads, is helping the team prepare for the upcoming competition, which runs March 22 through March 25 in Beverly Hills, Calif.
“This is a really big deal,” Luks said. The Buffleheads “competed against top-notch schools (in the region) with some of the top computer science programs.”
Luks added he thought the three worked well as a group.
“This is a very confident team,” he said. “They have shot at doing very well.”
Marr and Howells knew each other from a computing class before being put on the same team, but they hadn’t met Stutzbach. After several intense five-hour long practices, however, the three have come together to form a strong bond.
“This is one of the best teams I’ve seen,” Luks said.