On April 9, three Binghamton University students will travel to San Antonio, Texas, to compete in the world finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), sponsored by IBM. The students will compete for various awards, prizes and — of course — bragging rights.

The event is run by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the oldest and largest professional society for computer programmers. Teams are given eight or more extremely difficult real world programming problems to complete within five hours. The team that solves the most problems in the fewest attempts with the least cumulative time is declared the winner.

“The competition provides a way to focus people’s energy and creativity; pursuing excellence in fields that problem solving [is] important in,” said Doug Heintzman, director of strategy at IBM and sponsorship executive of the ICPC.

Second-year computer science graduate student Andrew Paroski, junior math major Natan Zohar and senior computer science and math double major Nicholas Maliwacki compose the team, aptly named “The Binghamton Beercats.” The group was put together by ACM chapter president Alyssa Ogawa and coached by associate computer science professor Patrick Madden.

“Before we had the chapter formation, we would just ask people we knew around the department, ‘Who do you think is pretty sharp?’” Ogawa said. “Before preliminaries we had more than the six people we were allowed to bring so we held a little informal competition on campus.”

Out of the competition, two teams were formed. Both competed at the regional preliminaries and the Beercats managed to make it through to the next level. At the regional finals, the team put up an impressive showing, beating out many highly-ranked teams.

“The whole ride back from the competition we just kept saying ‘We beat Harvard,’” Maliwacki said. “In terms of tuition dollar per brain cell – we’re blowing them out of the water. In my opinion, the Binghamton students can go head-to-head with anyone.”

Binghamton is one of 83 schools that qualified to participate in the event, selected from 1,733 colleges and universities, spread throughout 84 countries, that originally entered the competition. Recent winners have included teams from China, Poland and Russia.

The group has recently been preparing by hosting smaller, local competitions as practice, and meeting frequently to discuss strategy. Mainly, however, the students have been researching on their own and borrowing textbooks from their coach.

Besides the possible prizes the team could win, there is a great deal that both the University and students stand to gain from participation in the world finals. Not only has IBM been known to recruit members from winning teams, but the school’s reputation is bolstered by its participation in the event.

“As far as the importance of the competition, going to worlds certainly raises the profile of the school,” Madden said. “Much like athletic competitions — winning an NCAA championship doesn’t make the students any smarter, but it does increase donations to the school and makes good students want to apply.”

While the competition can be very stressful and tiresome, it’s not all work and no play. The members of the team agreed that while they put a lot of effort into it, they also enjoy the process.

“It’s going to be a lot of fun,” Zohar said. “They’re putting us up in a nice hotel and giving us free food.”