By Erin DostalThe Daily Northwestern

Using algorithms, C++ and teamwork, three McCormick students sat down to a test of seven complex questions like “Imagine you’re dropping a sequence of spheres into a cylindrical garbage can. At the end of the sequence, what is the height of the spheres?”

Anda Bereczky, Nikolay Valtchanov and Nikola Borisov represented Northwestern at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Mid-Central USA Regional Contest, winning an opportunity to compete at the International Collegiate Programming Contest in Tokyo this March.

“Personally, I couldn’t believe it,” Bereczky said of winning the competition with her team, called the Wildcats. “This year we only went to the regional to see what it was like.”

An NU team hadn’t participated for several years, but in November’s regional competition, the Wildcats defeated 122 teams from five states.

At the competition, each team is given five hours to complete the seven puzzles. NU’s team was the only one to solve all seven, said John Cigas, director of the Mid-Central USA Regional Contest.

“Five hours might seem like a lot of time, but we’re writing extensively with effort until minutes before the end,” said Borisov, a McCormick freshman.

Once a team completed a problem, it sent the solution to a judge in a separate room. The judge then ran the program to determine if it was correctly executed.

When teams correctly solved a problem, they were given different colored balloons.

“It’s pretty stressing also, because you know, you get to see all the other teams get balloons,” Bereczky said.

Teams were awarded points based on speed and the number of problems solved.

“Although this contest is called the International Collegiate Programming Contest, most of the problems they get are basically puzzles,” said Peter Dinda, the team’s coach and a professor in McCormick’s Electrical engineering and computer science department. “They have to develop algorithms to solve the puzzle.”

As coach, Dinda helps the team find funding and provides basic tips and training in writing algorithms.

Dinda also coached the other NU team at the contest, the Northwestern Purple, made up of McCormick freshman Henry Petrash and first-year graduate student Srinivasa Vemuri. Although the third team member fell ill before regionals, the two member team placed 76th.

Valtchanov and Borisov, who had previously competed in computer science contests at the high school level in their native country of Bulgaria, knew they wanted to give it a shot in college.

The Wildcats formed their team four weeks before the regional competition. The pressures of schoolwork limit the team to three to four hours per week to practice for the competition, Valtchanov said, which is far less than most international teams.

“What’s really rewarding is that all these people that go to the finals are really, really, really smart people,” said Valtchanov, a sophomore. “Most of them have done this sort of thing for years. It’s normally really challenging to get to this stage.”

In Tokyo, the Wildcats will compete against 88 other teams from around the world. While there is a cash prize for the winners, the event’s main purpose is to recruit promising students for programming jobs.

“The main thing is that large companies like Google and Amazon tend to scout for employees at these places,” Dinda said.

Last year, Google offered internships to all students in the top teams, Dinda said.

This year’s competition was a nail-biter. With one hour left, several teams had completed 6 of the 7 problems. Until minutes before the end, the Wildcats were in fifth place overall, but they were able to pull through in the clutch.

“I think they’re a very ambitious set of students, and I think that Nikolay Valtchanov is a very good leader – he’s good at making things happen,” Dinda said. “It’s that combination that has served them well so far.”

The team plans to compete again next year. They hope more students will get involved.

“We’re just one team,” Borisov said. “It would be really great if there were more people who want to participate.”

Reach Erin Dostal at [email protected].