Computer Team Nabs Northeast Region Title

Harvard's computer team won the Northeast Regional Scholastic Programming Contest on Saturday for the third year in a row and again qualified to compete in the international finals.

Between 20 and 30 teams of four students each met at Western New England College in Springfield for the annual competition sponsored by the Association of Computing Machinery. In the contest, students tried to write computer programs in the computer language Pascal to solve seven math and programming problems. When the six-hour time limit expired, Harvard had successfully completed six of the problems; the second-place team had solved only four.

"When it was over, we were a bit relieved," remarked team member Benjamin Waldman '89. "Because Harvard won the past couple of years, we felt the pressure to win again."

The team, composed of four students who had not been on the team before, was selected by the faculty of the Computer Science Department to represent Harvard. These students were Waldman, a teaching fellow for Computer Science 180 and 280; Cliff Young '89, publisher of the Harvard Computer Review; Sandeep Kochlar, a graduate student in computer science and a resident tutor in Dudley House, and Mark Nitzberg, a graduate student in mathematics. McKay Professor of Computer Science Harry R. Lewis served as adviser for the team.

By winning this contest, Harvard earned the right to compete in February's international finals, which will be held this year in Louisville, Ky. The contest will coincide with the Association of Computing Machinery's national convention.

"The programs are simple Pascal programs that anyone who has taken Computer Science 150 could do, given enough time," Young said. "The trick is the time limit...[the contest] doesn't test practical programming skills; you just have to write code quickly to satisfy the judges.