MEDIA ADVISORY

Three University of Alaska Fairbanks students flexed their problem-solving and computing skills at the Nov. 14 Pacific Region International Collegiate Programming Contest and placed fifth overall out of 57 teams. Only powerhouse schools UC-Berkeley and Stanford, each with two winning teams, placed above UAF in the contest which pitted schools in Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada against each other for a shot at the World Finals in the Netherlands next spring. Only the top two teams, Berkeley and Stanford, will move on to the World Finals.

The winning UAF team was a trio of seniors: art major Layla Borchardt from Anchorage, computer science major Gregg Christopher, also from Anchorage and Orion Lawlor, a computer science major from Glennallen.

Six problems representing real-world examples were presented to the teams to solve within a five hour time limit. Past contest problems have required students to search for a missing boat at sea, triangulate the location of a faulty transmitter, stack pipe of varying diameters in a fixed width bin, or process satellite images. Teams are ranked according to the most problems solved within the allotted time.

UAF's team finished five of the six problems presented. Three teams finished six of the six and only one other team finished five, but did so faster than UAF.

First held in 1977, the International Collegiate Programming Contest is sponsored by Association for Computing Machinery, the world's oldest and largest educational and scientific computing society .

Funding for the UAF team's participation was sponsored in part by Internet Alaska and Fort Nocs, an electronic transaction and Internet commerce business in Anchorage.

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DPD/11-18-98/99-031ma