A team of three Johns Hopkins undergraduates will represent the university this week in Prague, Czech Republic, in the international finals of a competition for collegiate computer programmers.

The Hopkins group will be among 25 North American teams and 73 overall taking part in the Association for Computing Machinery Collegiate Programming Contest. Each team will be given seven to nine complex programming challenges to complete in less than five hours. The Hopkins team earned a place in the world finals after emerging as one of four winners in the mid-Atlantic regional contest.

During the competition, sponsored by IBM, the three team members must share one computer and pool their skills to write computer programs that will solve difficult mathematical and logical problems. The team that solves the most problems in the fewest attempts in the least cumulative time is declared the winner.

"It will be a very tough competition," said Christian Scheideler, an assistant professor of computer science who serves as the Hopkins students' coach. "Some of the teams are incredibly well prepared. They send their teams to camp to practice for this event."

The three members of the Hopkins team are Jim Plotts, 22, a senior from Belmar, N.J., majoring in computer science; Shiroman Prakash, 20, a junior from Harford County, Md., majoring in physics; and John Rittenhouse, 21, a junior from Peters Township, just outside Pittsburgh, Pa., double-majoring in biomedical engineering and computer science.
— Phil Sneiderman

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