Three computer science majors - sophomore Nathaniel Barshay, senior Tom Conerly and junior Si Young Oh - will be competing at the World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on March 3.

Their team, the Dragons, placed second in the ACM-ICPC East Central North American Regional Programming Contest in Cincinnati Oct. 23. The Dragons completed all eight of the contest problems, but were outpointed by a team from the University of Waterloo in a tiebreaker. The regional included 112 teams from 56 colleges and universities throughout western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, eastern Ontario, and most of Indiana. CMU had four teams in the competition.

"I think the Dragons are probably one of our strongest teams to date," said Danny Sleator, professor of computer science and coach of the CMU teams. "They're really dedicated and have put a huge amount of time into training." PhD student Richard Peng and Eugene Fink, senior systems scientist, also have helped coach the teams this year.

The members of all four CMU teams are computer science majors.

All of the CMU teams finished in the top 10 and three were in the top five. "Our other very strong team, the Tartans, got off to a tremendous start, solving six problems in about 1 1/2 hours and leading the entire field for most of the contest," Sleator said. That team, which finished fourth, included junior Jon Adams and seniors Alan Pierce and Junjie Liang.

The other teams were TriForce, which finished fifth and included senior Jinyu Liu, graduate student William Wang and junior Tim Wilson, and the Bagpipes, which finished in ninth place and included sophomores Jimmy Koppel and Jonathan Paulson and junior Peter Liang.

Travel and other team expenses have been provided once again this year by IMC Financial Markets of Chicago.