Villanova Department of Computing Sciences

On October 25 the Computing Sciences Department sent two teams ("Wildcats Blue" and "Wildcats White") to Wilkes University to compete in the 31st annual regional International Collegiate Programming Contest conducted by the Association for Computing Machinery, the international professional organization for computer scientists.  The contest challenges teams to develop and write programs to solve eight problems in five hours.  Each team has three members and one computer.  Teams can solve problems using Java or C++.

Wildcats Blue finished four problems and Wildcats White finished two problems.  These results earned the Blue team a 2nd place finish out of 21 teams at the Wilkes site and tied for 5th place out of 161 teams from 66 schools in the entire region from North Carolina to Pennsylvania.  The "Wildcats White" team's performance earned an 83rd place.  Only fourteen other teams managed to solve four problems, and only four teams in the entire region solved more than four problems. The 19th-place finish and 2nd-place site finish represents the best record achieved by a Villanova team in a region containing schools such as Lehigh, Virginia Tech, Duke, Drexel, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore.  Kory Kirk ('09),  AJ Palkovic ('10), and Casey Burkhardt ('11) were members of "Wildcats Blue." Richard Banister ('09), Kristen Raudonis ('11), and Stephen Walters ('09) were members of "Wildcats White."  Dr. Frank Klassner is team coach.