Programmers Prove Their Prowess

They line the walls of a hot room overlooking the group of young men who make up the University's computer programming team, a jocular bunch made up of four students and two coaches. The group recently returned from Honolulu, where it competed in the World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest on March 20-24.

"Our team was the most relaxed team that had the most fun," said Ketan Mayer-Patel, a UNC computer science professor and one of the team's coaches. Team member Chris Schenck, who graduated in December, agreed. "Our motto was: 'Relaxed, but not lazy,'" he said.

The other team members, John Ehrhardt, Nate Massey and alternate Mike Trinh -- all friends outside of the competition -- will graduate this spring.

Kevin Jeffay, the team's other coach and a UNC computer science professor, was pleased with the team's accomplishment. "We were just happy to make it to the final tournament. We didn't even have that expectation -- no expectation of that at all," he said.

But they did have one hope.

"If we had any goal it was to beat Duke," Jeffay said.

Although they did not meet this goal, the team was enthused to have made it to the competition -- and Hawaii. They received honorable mention.

Shanghai JiaoTong University placed first, Massachusetts Institute of Technology placed second, and Duke University placed eighth.

But team members weren't disheartened with the results. "It's nice to see how you stack up against others," Trinh said.

At the World Finals, the team competed against 63 other three-person teams from 27 countries and six continents.

Placed at table 51, they named themselves "Area 51" as they strategized in casual Carolina blue T-shirts and khaki shorts. They also set out a chess board as intimidation. "Not only can we program, we can play chess at the same time," Mayer-Patel said, laughing.

Since the University's first participation in the contest in 1996, this year's team is the only one to make it to the World Finals. And unlike Duke's and many other universities' teams, the UNC team did not have access to a credited class to prepare for the competition.

Practicing on the oddly named computers in the basement room, the team listened to Miles Davis while working through previous competitions' problems. "We were in it for the free food and stuff," Schenk said, with a jolly chuckle aimed at his teammate friends. "Of course we wanted to do our best and try. But we wanted to have fun," Mayer-Patel said.

Like "Area 51," the other 63 teams worked at a station, each with one computer, as they scrambled to fit a semester's worth of programming into five hours without making any mistakes.

The competing programmers were given eight problems that challenged them to create a program that could solve each problem and be applied to more difficult problems.

The winning team completed the most problems, six, in the fewest attempts with the least cumulative time.

"It's fun. It's a challenge," Massey said while his teammates laughed at his bushy hair, making him smirk.

Trinh and Massey are both sons of computer programmers and said programming is fairly natural to them.

In the heat of the competition, responsibilities were split between the three, with each member working with one problem.

Another split the team encountered at the World Finals was the gender split. Jeffay said only 17 female contestants competed this year, which is more than last year. "One of our goals for next year's competition is to get an all women's team," he said. "I'm going to try to find a group (of UNC women) that already knows each other and get them to try it."

But regardless of gender, next year's team, like this year's, will be made of volunteers who meet in the depths of the computer science building to practice -- laughing with Foghorn, Yako, Petunia and Porky.

The Features Editor can be reached at features@unc.edu.