Students among best programmers

Armed only with logic, strategy, mental endurance and a single computer, two UVic math and computer science teams marched into a battle of the brains against 24,000 other students and returned triumphant.

Dan Sanders, Jen Debroni, and Leon Senft placed third, and a second team of Tim Song, Jesse Short-Gershman and Cory Binnersley finished fifteenth in the 2011 Pacific Northwest Regional Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Programming Contest held on Nov. 5. Part of the world’s longest-running and most prestigious programming contest, the ACM regional competition included over 8,000 teams from 2,070 universities and 88 countries.

According to computer science professor Frank Ruskey, “All credit for this epic performance goes to these six students. Unlike other teams, they organized their practices, their travel, and their entry into the contest on their own."

Bright futures are on the horizon for all the competitors. For Dan Sanders and Jen Debroni, the Googleplex beckons; both have received offers from Google, and will be starting their new jobs in Mountain View, CA in the new year.