Tech CS Students Win Big at Programming Contest

by George Zamora

DURANGO, Colo., April 16, 2001 -- A team of New Mexico Tech computer science students once again took top honors at the recently held Seventeenth Annual Fort Lewis College Programming Contest in Durango, Colo. Last year, a team from Tech also took first-place honors at the annual competition.

New Mexico Tech fielded three teams in the computing competition this year, and all fared well. However, it would be the team of David Catanach, Benjamin Gordon, and D. Jackson Peacock which would outpace and outprogram 14 other participating undergraduate teams to walk away with first-place honors at the regional event.

"New Mexico Tech Team 2," as they were called, correctly solved six of seven problems at the daylong competition, with computer programs written on the spot using common programming languages such as Java and C/C++.

New Mexico Tech Team 1, comprised of Zac Bradshaw, Ben Leiting, and Nick Pattengale, solved five of the seven problems posed and captured second place at the contest.

James Kyle Campbell, Aaron Prager, and Keith Sanchez, or New Mexico Tech Team 3 as the group was known, ended up in fourth place overall after solving three of the problems.

Some of the real-world problems presented included writing programs which kept running tallies of estimated times posted in a ski race and writing programs that took proper fractions and turned them into "Egyptian fractions," which are the sums of several unique fractions that each have a numerator of one.

Faculty advisor for all three of New Mexico Tech's programming teams was Allan M. Stavely, associate professor of computer science with Tech's computer science department.