RIT's computer science majors beat MIT, UR in contest

A team of three RIT computer science majors beat 10 other university teams -- including MIT, the University of Rochester and Brown -- placing the team second (barely behind Harvard) in the association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Northeastern Regional Competition in Massachusetts last fall. RIT and Harvard won a trip to the World Finals in the Netherlands this past April. Seniors Mark Roth, Stephan Roorda and Paul Mason make up RIT's team, coached by Assistant Professor Paul Tymann. The three took first place over nine teams in the local contest, enabling them to compete in the regional event.

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, established in 1970, is the oldest and largest programming competition for the world's universities. Each year more than 4,000 students from around the globe participate. The contest, sponsored by IBM, gives each three-member team five hours to complete six to eight complex programming problems using Pascal, C, C++ or Java programming languages. The RIT team used Java.