Contact: Herbert J. Bernstein
Professor of Computer Science
631-244-3035, yaya@dowling.edu

DRAFT -- NOT FOR RELEASE
November 10, 2003

Dowling College Students Score Well at ACM Regional Collegiate Programming Contest

OAKDALE, NY -- Competing against other teams from the Greater New York metropolitan region at NYIT Old Westbury on Sunday, November 9, 2003, three teams of Dowling College students placed seventh, thirty-eighth and fifty-third in a field of sixty teams from twenty-eight schools. The team of Petko Ivanov, Peter Zhivkov and Iva Zafirova came in just behind teams from Cornell, Columbia, NYU, Stony Brook and Yale and ahead of other teams from Brooklyn College, Cooper Union, Stevens Institute, Hofstra, Cornell, Yeshiva, Yale, NYU, Ramapo College, NYIT, Columbia, and many other schools. The teams of Rohit Tripathi, Stavros Louris, and Enxin Huang and of Parag Jain, Sagar Pilania and Christopher Utz also scored well, coming in ahead of teams from Vassar, Kean, Cooper Union and Rutgers in one case and Fairfield, Adelphi and Fordham in the other. Professor Herbert J. Bernstein, coach of the Dowling teams said, "We have some extremely good students at Dowling College. Their excellent performance in this competition is the result of impressive talent and of many hours of practice and hard work. We are very proud of their accomplishments."

The 2003 Greater New York ACM Regional Collegiate Programming Contest, sponsored by IBM, was hosted by the New York Institute of Technology at its Old Westbury Campus and drew undergraduate and graduate computer science students from the metropolitan New York region. The regional contest is part of the worldwide Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Students working in teams of three had five hours to answer nine programming questions on such topics as working out the distance measured by a trip odometer, the number of different ways poems can be rhymed, the ways to win a peg board game on a seven by seven board, ways to share candy among children. Solving even one or two of these problems in five hours would be challenging. Ivanov, Zhivkov and Zafirova solved four of them.

Complete standings for the competition are available at http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/regionals/ViewStandings.asp?ContestID=641

About Dowling College
Dowling College is an independent, coeducational college that serves more than 7,000 students at its historic Rudolph Campus on the banks of the Connetquot River in Oakdale, NY, and the 105-acre Brookhaven Center in eastern Long Island. Dowling offers Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctoral degrees in several disciplines through its four schools: Arts and Sciences, Aviation, Business, and Education.