12/8/08

CIT student will head to Sweden for computing contest

Computer and information technology student Zhanibek Datbayev will travel with his teammates to Stockholm, Sweden, in April to compete in the world finals for the ACM-International Collegiate Programming Contest.

It will mark the first time that a Purdue team has been to the finals since the 1980s.

Purdue Cheburashka placed third among colleges and fourth among all teams in the ACM-International Collegiate Programming Contest east central North America regional held Nov. 1. 

Other members of the Purdue Cheburashka team were Nathan Claus, a mathematics major, and Arman Suleimenov, a computer science major.

The contest is a five-hour event in which teams of three students work together to solve eight programming puzzles. Ranking among teams is based first on how many problems are solved correctly, then on how many minutes it takes to solve each problem. A 20-minute penalty on solved problems is added for each submission that fails to pass the judges' test cases. Programming is done in Java or C/C++.