Ruth Brown

A group of computer science majors at SDSU programmed their way into the second-place slot at the Association for Computer Machinery’s computer programming contest at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Seniors Scott Kool, Michael VanBemmel and Tigh Kistler are computer science majors at SDSU and participated in the annual computer programming event with their team, Never Gonna Let You Down.

“The students are required to write a program that can solve a list of problems,” said Manki Min, an assistant professor of computer science who advised the group of students. “They were given ten questions, and they solved seven.”

According to the AMC’s Web site, the problems are supposed to be “real-life problems.”

The Web site said in the past there have been problems such as finding a missing boat at sea, computing golf handicaps, coding or decoding messages, solving a math problem or triangulating the location of a faulty transmitter.

“They placed second at Nebraska-Lincoln, and they placed fifth in the North Central North America Region,” said Min. “They are now a wildcard and will have to wait and see if they will have the opportunity to go to world.”

A total of 201 teams from 60 schools in the United States and Canada belong to the NCNA Region. The other regions are not yet finished with their competitions, so the SDSU team will have to wait to find out if they qualify for the world competition in February 2010.