A smart and disciplined UW-Madison team has advanced for the ninth straight year to its top tournament.
And it's not the football or basketball squad.
It's the university's three-member computer programming team, which learned this week it's heading to China in February for the IBM-sponsored world finals.
The team's consistent success is great publicity for UW-Madison and its high-tech prowess. It also helps further Wisconsin's reputation as a strong source of knowledge and new-economy workers.
All of the members on Bucky's top team are computer science students from the Midwest: graduate student David He of Plymouth, Minn., grad student Chris Hopman of Green Bay, and junior Zef RosnBrick of Madison.
UW-Madison associate professor of computer science Dieter van Melkebeek recruits and coaches the squad.
UW's top team was one of only 100 to make it to the international finals. About 7,000 teams participated in the first round. Bucky's brains will have only one computer and five hours to write codes solving 10 complicated problems.
How tough are the questions?
One sample problem requires the programmers to automate the order and safe landing of airplanes at an airport. The program has to maximize the time gap between successive landings to give pilots as much opportunity as possible to react to changing weather and other surprises.
We can't publish the question here because of all the strange math symbols. For most people, the directions to the problem would read like a foreign language.
Yet UW's top team, which calls itself "Wrong Answer," was the only team out of 201 at regional competition last month in Kenosha to get all 10 challenge questions correct.
"You have to split up the time," coach Van Melkebeek explained. "Somebody is coding, and obviously you need the computer for that. But you don't need a computer for the algorithm."
Speak for yourself, coach. Just spelling "algorithm" takes concentration for most of us.
Let's cheer these guys on to victory. Their success is a win for all of Wisconsin.
U-Rah-Rah!
Posted in Editorial on Thursday, November 12, 2009 10:25 am Updated: 10:39 am. Ibm, Technology, Dieter Van Melkebeek, David He, Chris Hopman, Zef Rosnbrick, Computer Programming, Uw-madison, University Of Wisconsin, Wrong Answer
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