Bryce Sandlund, Kerrick Staley, and Deveon Eilers returned to Ames from the ACM-ICPC World Finals in Warsaw with an honorable mention. The team from ISU was one of only 18 teams from the U.S. to qualify for the world finals. The top winner of the competition was from St. Petersburg State university in Russia. The top U.S. teams were Harvard University, which placed 7th, Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon, both of which placed 13th, and MIT at 18th place. "This is an incredibly tough competition," said team coach Dr. Simanta Mitra. "I was impressed with how our students conducted themselves and how they worked hard to solve those problems. We did as well as the other university teams from the US Midwest. Our students are not seniors, so they may place high enough in the regionals next fall to go to the next world finals in 2013."
Mitra serves as the ICPC teams coach each year, mentoring students for the competition starting early in the fall semester. Any student at ISU interested and able to contribute to a team with problem solving and programming skills can participate. The goal of the IBM sponsored global competition is to solve problems with programming as fast as possible. Dr. Mitra holds practice contests in preparation for the regional competition, which takes place each year at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln around the first weekend in November.