PITTSBURGH-A team of Carnegie Mellon University students won bronze medals and placed 12th overall out of 100 teams at the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals in Stockholm, Sweden.

It was the best finish ever by a Carnegie Mellon team at the World Finals.

The team of Tom Conerly and Alan Pierce, both sophomore computer science majors, and Celestine Lau, a senior in electrical and computer engineering, also finished third among all North American teams behind MIT and the University of Waterloo. Final standings are available from the ACM/ICPC Web site.

St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics in Russia was the World Champion.

The 100 teams in the World Finals, known as the Battle of the Brains, were selected from 7,109 teams from 1,838 universities in 88 countries on six continents. Each three-member team faced 11 problems of varying levels of difficulty. The St. Petersburg team solved nine of the problems; the Carnegie Mellon team solved six.

Carnegie Mellon's team was coached by Greg Kesden, associate teaching professor of computer science, Eugene Fink, systems scientist in the Computer Science Department and Language Technologies Institute, and Daniel Sleator, professor of computer science.