A Carnegie Mellon team will be competing at the World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest in China next year, but it won't be the Tartans.

Judges of the East Central North American Regional Programming Contest say they misjudged one of the problems, mistakenly disallowing a solution to Problem B. Once the correction was made and points re-tallied, they proclaimed a team from the University of Waterloo as the champions and awarded second place to the Carnegie Mellon Dragons, a team consisting of sophomore Si Young Oh, junior Yun Dong "Stanley" Yeo, and senior Dan Schafer, all computer science majors.

The original winners, the Tartan team of computer science juniors Tom Conerly and Alan Pierce and electrical and computer engineering senior Celestine Lau, ended up third.

Greg Kesden, associate teaching professor and one of the Carnegie Mellon coaches, said the rejudging resulted in a three-way tie between the Dragons, Tartans and Waterloo's Black team; a tiebreaker formula produced the final ranking. The University of Michigan's Victor team, originally second, ended up in fourth place. Carnegie Mellon's third team, the Cardinals - freshmen Chiranjith "Jitu" Das and James Koppel and junior Ida Mayer, all computer science majors - remains in 10th place

The top two teams from the regional - Waterloo Black and the Dragons - will be among 100 teams that will compete at the World Finals, Feb. 1-6, 2010, in Harbin, China.