Montana Tech #1 In Montana

On October 20th the senior Montana Tech International College Programming Contest (ICPC) team bested all other ICPC teams in Montana. The Montana Tech senior team came in second at the University of Utah site and ninth in the ICPC Rocky Mountain region; a significant improvement over their performance the previous year. The team members, all seniors at Montana Tech, were (left to right) Mikeal Day from Hermiston, OR; Ryan Weis from Kalispell, MT, and Tyler Dusek from Havre, MT.

The International College Programming contest is run by the major international professional organization for computer science, the Association of Computing Machinery. The first contest was held in 1974. The IBM Corporation has been sponsoring this contest since 1997. Since that year participation has grown from 1,000 teams to 6,100 teams from universities and colleges in 82 countries on six continents. The competition challenges students to solve a suite of real-world computer programming problems under a grueling five-hour deadline. Teams gain points not only by solving problems, but by how quickly they solve them. They lose points if they don't get a solution perfectly correct on the first try. The winning team from each of 90 regions around the globe will compete in the World Finals in Banff, Alberta in April.

A goal of the Montana Tech Computer Science Department is to improve the performance of all of our teams: sophomore, junior, and senior each and every year until we are first in our region and send a team to the World Finals. To that end Montana Tech is one of the few schools in the country that offer, as an elective, a course in competitive programming. A few special skills are involved in performing well in this competition, but more importantly the course emphasizes the coordinated use of all the problem solving and programming skills that our students are exposed to in all of our standard computer science and software engineering courses.