Nine are Not Enough: Two Top-Ten SB Finishes in ACM Regional Programming Contest.

Our teams finished 5th, 6th and 12th among 51 teams at the ACM ICPC Greater New York Regional Programming Contest held at Adelphi University on October 30, 2011. We were the only school to place three teams in the top dozen of the field -- accompanied in the elite ranks only by teams from Princeton (2), Columbia (2), NYU (2), Yale (2), and Cornell (1).

Princeton 1 finished first, edging Columbia's top team by only eleven minutes of elapsed time. These were the only two teams which finished all 9 problems. We hung with them most of the afternoon, with Stony Brook teams ranked third and fourth after 4 completed problems and still in third with 7 problems down.

The Stony Brook 1 undergraduate student team of Chao Xu, Kevin Sackel, and Jiajun Wu finished a strong fifth with 8 problems. They would have finished fourth except for a momentary lapse misidentifying the C++ program they had just written as being in Java. Chao and Kevin are just juniors and improved from 16th place last year.

The graduate student Stony Brook 2 team of Gaurav Menghani, Ji Feifei, and Lanbo Chen were right behind them in sixth place: the fastest team with 7 problems. They got off to a very quick start and held third with four problems down -- but could not punch the eighth one over.

The mixed team of Vincent Tsuei, Jaison George, and Suryanarayanan Balasubramanian solved a total of 6 problems (including one just 9 minutes into the contest) and finished 12th. Vincent is just a sophomore and will be back to give it another whack next year.

All in all a good year -- and we should have the horses next year for a top flight UG team.