Northwest programmers repeat as regional champs

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At left: The team of Alyssa Crawford, Aditya Sunchu and Andy Pryor won first-place regional honors at the
Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest in St. Joseph.
Honorable mention competitors from Northwest, at right, were Sarah Peters, Sai Swaroop, David Alexander
and Andrew Fairhurst.

For the second year in row, a student team from Northwest's Department of Computer Science and Information Systems has won first place at the regional level in the Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest.

The annual contest, billed as the "Battle of the Brains," is organized by ACM and sponsored by IBM. This year's regional took place Saturday, Nov. 3, at Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph.

Northwest's winning team consists of Alyssa Crawford, Overland Park, Kan.; Aditya Sunchu, Hyderabad, India; and Andy Pryor, Woodbine Iowa. The trio formed the only group able to correctly solve all three programming problems in the allotted five hours.

Northwest students who earned honorable mention included Sarah Peters, Manhattan, Kan.; Sai Swaroop, Hyderabad, India; David Alexander, St. Joseph; and Andrew Fairhurst, Kansas City.

According to ACM, the difficulty level of the problems is roughly equivalent to completing a semester's worth of computer programming in a single afternoon.

More than 6,000 teams have taken part, or will take part, in preliminary rounds of competition lasting through December. Ninety surviving teams from all over the world will face off April 8-12 in Banff Springs, Alberta, Canada, where they will compete for scholarships, prizes and the bragging rights that come with winning the "World's Smartest Trophy."

Other schools who sent teams to St. Joseph last week included Missouri Western, the University of Central Missouri, Park University and the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

For more information, please contact:

Anthony Brown,
News Bureau Manager
E-Mail: abrown@nwmissouri.edu
Phone (660) 562-1704
Fax (660) 562-1900

Northwest Missouri State University
219 Administration Building,
800 University Drive
Maryville, MO 64468

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