A Hamilton College Computer Programming Team has been formed to compete in collegiate programming competitions. A select group of students, under the guidance of Associate Professors of Computer Science Alistair Campbell and Mark Bailey, have been training since January for competitions. At such competitions, student teams from various colleges and universities are each given a set of problems to solve by writing computer programs. In a race against the clock, each team is ranked according to the number of problems solved in the shortest time.
Hamilton sent two teams to the annual conference and programming competition of the Northeast Region of the Consortium for Computing in Small Colleges at the Rochester Institute of Technology in April. The first team, consisting of Nadine Amsel '08, Tom Helmuth '09, and Jeff Grossman '09 placed 11th out of 37 teams competing. The second team, consisting of Dane Johnson '07, Tawanda Mashavave '10, and Mike Sennott '09, placed 16th. Hamilton peer institutions competing at R.I.T. included Middlebury (#1), Colby (#26), and Wellesley (#36).
Hamilton's next appearance in intercollegiate programming competition will be the Association for Computing Machinery Regional Competition at SUNY Oswego, in October 2007. The winner of that competition will qualify for the ACM National Competition in the spring.
