Taylor’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering sent two teams to compete in the East Central North America Regional Programming Contest, held on Saturday, November 1, 2008, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Out of 123 teams participating from 65 colleges and universities throughout western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, eastern Ontario, and Indiana, Taylor’s teams placed 10th (TU team #1) and 36th (TU team #2). The teams they competed against included Carnegie Mellon University, University of Waterloo, Purdue University, and several other large universities.
Professor Stefan Brandle expressed his pride in their performance. “The only school to beat us that is even vaguely our size is Cedarville, which had a team in 7th (place),” said Brandle. He pointed out that the top teams from the two schools scored better than all of the teams from the University of Toronto, Oberlin, Ohio State, University of Pennsylvania at Pittsburg, Case Western Reserve, and Notre Dame.
Members of the teams from Taylor included:
• Team #1 (Taylor Gold team): Jeremy Erickson (’09), David Kasper (’09), and Seth Bird (’10)
• Team #2 (Taylor Purple; team): Levi Carter (’10), Austin Brown (’10), and Sean Knutson (’11)
(All members of Team #2 were participating in their first ACM programming contest.)
Taylor has a long history of doing well at ACM ECNA competitions. Even so, the 10th-place score for this year surpasses Taylor’s scores for the previous three years:
• 2007–08: 14th out of 116 teams
• 2006–07: 26th out of 106 teams
• 2005–06: 33rd out of 113 teams
The teams from Taylor were accompanied by Professor Jonathan Geisler. The International Collegiate Programming Contest is an annual event sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery in various regions of North America.