Winthrop Team Places in International Programming Competition

ROCK HILL, SOUTH CAROLINA — Could you write a computer program that can help a fictitious tropical island determine an airplane landing strip? How about one that can identify a consumer-producer relationship that would maximize your monetary profit?

Perhaps you can't, but Winthrop University's talented student computer programming teams could, and they proved it at the 2017 Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest. Hosted by the College of Charleston this year, one of the Winthrop teams placed second overall in the competition, defeating teams from the University of South Carolina, Wofford College and others.

Winthrop has participated in the competition for approximately 20 years, said Will Thacker, coach and professor of computer science.

Teams of three students each work on nine to 11 problems for approximately five hours, offering programming solutions via one computer. The computer tries to "break" the program, answering with either "correct" or "incorrect."

"The team always wants to know what was the test case that caused their program to not work, since they have tested it on many of their own cases," Thacker explained. "But they are never told, so this is another layer of problem to be solved. Students are exhausted and frustrated at the end of the competition!"

Participating students were:

*Daniel Alexander, computer science, York;
*Matea Milojkovic, business administration, Fort Mill;
*Peter Nguyen, computer science, Fort Mill;
*Sybrina Outhay, computer science, Rock Hill;
*Keleigh Romine, computer science, Concord, North Carolina; and
*Megan Taite, computer science, York.

Celeste Tiller '01, '04, director of external relations and the Institute of Management for the College of Business Administration, noted that Winthrop had the most female participants of any school.

For more information, contact Thacker at 803/323-2691 or thackerw@winthrop.edu.