News

ACM Team Advance to Northeast Finals

Oct. 25, 2006

Congratulations to students Joe Langeway, James Scheffler, and Patrick Carter for placing second place in the preliminary Association for Computing Machinery programming competition. They will advance to the Northeast finals on November 11 in Rochester, NY. The team, named "Fighting Owls," solved six out of seven problems, as much as both teams from Harvard an hour before the end of the competition. This success has been the first for any of the Connecticut State Universities.

From left to right: Imad Antonios, Patrick Carter, Joe Langeway, and James Scheffler

All teams were given a choice of two programming languages - C++ or Java. Their programming language of choice - Java, because it supports garbage collection.

According to the team, no one was assigned a leadership position but they did have definite roles. Langeway was the terminal man - typing code while James "The Debugging Machine" did just that, he debugs.

The team gives advice to anyone who may want to compete next year. "Program continuously. Practice it. Professors don't assign homework every night, but that is no reason not to practice it anyway." says Langeway. Scheffler says "Programming a solution is less important than figuring out how to solve it." Imad Antonios, the team's advisor, follows "You can have a working solution, but it may not be efficient." Efficiency weighs into the score.

Langeway will be graduating this December with a degree in Computer Science. He plans to go to graduate school and become a professor. Scheffler will graduate next spring also with a degree in Computer Science. He plans to be an officer in the Marine Corps. Patrick Carter, who is double majoring in Computer Science and Physics hopes to compete next year.