The Auburn Programming Team was in a race against the clock at the Association of Computing Machinery’s International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC) South East Regional. Five teams, each consisting of three students from Auburn’s Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, competed in the annual event in Atlanta, hosted by Georgia Tech.

Each team received one computer to share, five hours and 10 long word problems to solve through computer programming. Students involved in the competition spent much of their free time during the fall semester preparing for the event by attending weekly practices, studying algorithms, programming languages and general computing. All five Auburn teams put on an impressive show, placing in the top 15 out of 47 teams, including both first and second place.

William Hester, junior in computer science and software engineering, served as a student coach as well as a member of the second place team. “I was confident going into this competition that we were going to be fairly successful,” said Hester. “It was an amazing result seeing our teams place as well as they did.”

The regional contest serves as a host to advance teams to the ACM-ICPC World Finals, to be held in Morocco in May.