Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 22, 1991 TAG: 9103220693
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE/ NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
They came in third.
Coach Sallie Henry believes that's pretty good.
"If you take a look at some of the teams we competed against - it's not shabby," Henry said of the Tech team's high finish at the 15th Annual Scholastic Programming Contest March 6 at San Antonio, Texas.
In fact, of some 375 schools competing in the AT&T Computer Systems-backed contest - which pits top computer students against one another in a kind of programmer's rodeo - Tech finished behind only Stanford University and the Vrije Universiteit in The Netherlands.
Left in the dust - or at least further down the list of winners - were Harvard, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Brown, Oberlin College and the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, among others.
The University of Virginia tied for 10th. UVA had finished second to Tech in a regional qualifying match held in the fall, Henry said.
In San Antonio, the Tech team - which consists of computer science graduate students Pat Brown and Joe Lavinus, undergraduate Brad Grantham and engineering student Alex Barry - pitted its skills against college teams from some 19 countries.
Among the contestants were schools in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union is expected to enter a team next year, said Beth Olson, spokeswoman for the Association for Computing Machinery, which runs the 15-year-old contest.
The contest, Olson said, "is about programming under pressure."
Each team has five hours to tackle eight programming problems, START JUMP TYPE HERE START JUMP TYPE HERE each of which Olson said is "pretty complex."
This year's problems included routing fire trucks around city streets, scheduling surgery patients through operating and recovery rooms and determining multiple ways to assign political districts.
Tech's team was ready. Members had spent some 10 hours a week for two months practicing for the competition.
"This has been kind of time-comsuming," conceded Brown, who has been using computers since he was 10. But he also said, "It's fun. It's a challenge. You get a free trip."
The Tech team won about $4,000 worth of scholarships and $6,000 worth of computer equipment for the school, Henry said.
It was not the first time a Tech team has placed high in the competition.
Tech's 1984 team placed second, Henry said. The 1985 team placed 12th, the 1990 team eighth.
In addition, she said Tech traditionally places first or second in the regional competition.
Henry, who puts the team together every year, said she recruits members from classes and clubs to whom she speaks about the contest.
"I'm a very competitive person. I always have been," said Henry, who also teaches computer science at Tech. "I tell them [the students] it's fame, fortune and travel."
Henry works to come up with the right team members for the contest - one whose math whizzes are balanced out by creative types, which includes good typists and an engineer.
Those who can't cut it - who get too nervous under pressure, or have trouble getting along with the other team members, for example - are axed from the team. "We don't pull any punches here," she said.
But asked if the competition had any relation to the atmosphere in which students would be expected to design computer software in the work place, Henry smiled.
"I certainly hope not," she said. "It's just a game."
The programming contest, originally a student-sponsored activity at Texas A&M University, has grown tremendously with AT&T's backing in the last two years, said Olson, the ACM spokeswoman.
AT&T provides some $25,000 worth of scholarships as prizes to the top six teams.
The corporation backs the event to help draw attention to a growing shortage of qualified software developers, according to an ACM press release on the competition.
by CNB