Hackers Triumph!

Last week saw success for three students, a research assistant and a lecturer from Computing Science. Tony Printezis, Mark de Wit, John Hagemeister, Matt Holgate and Gareth Mcsorley, aka The Midnight Hackers romped home as winners of the National Finals of the British Computer Society's Programming Competition Saturday, March 31. The Hacker's triumph comes after four previous attempts that saw them narrowly missing the coveted first place on two previous occasions.

The team members were presented with individual shields and a large trophy shield that will be on display in the Department over the next 12 months.

Speaking on behalf of the team, Tony Printezis said: "Having taken part for five years, and achieving 2nd place twice, we are delighted to finally win the BCS Programming Competition. We found this year's final very challenging. We had a bad start and were actually lagging behind by the time we solved the third question. However, we regrouped and focused our efforts on the fourth problem, which we solved on the second try (the first one had a minor output error) and that won us the competition.

"Once more we enjoyed participating and would like to thank everybody who gave up their free time organising it, setting questions, and giving us cryptic feedback during the event! We would like to encourage as many people as possible to take part: it's good fun and a great way to learn about team-work. We are also grateful to the Department for supporting our efforts over the past five years."

The 2001 Programming Competition was the seventeenth organised of the BCS and as always the winning formula was professionalism and fun. The teams had free access to a personal computer and standard software, and results were judged against hidden test data by a panel of judges appointed by the British Computer Society. The positions in the final were determined by the number of correct solutions (maximum 7) and the elapsed time taken to produce them, with a twenty minute penalty added for each incorrect judges run for a problem which is subsequently solved.

Contact: Jon Ritchie
Information Officer, Computing Science
0141 330 6854

Info on the competition: http://www.bcs.org.uk/ypg/progcomp/

Media Relations Office (media@gla.ac.uk)

First published: 11 April 2001