Si Young Oh, a senior majoring in computer science and mathematical sciences, and Tom Conerly, a 2011 computer science graduate, were among the 24 semi-finalists in the algorithm competition at the TopCoder Open in Hollywood, Fla., this week.

Neither one made the final round of eight, but bested thousands of competitors worldwide to earn their way to the Open. TopCoder is the world's largest competitive software development community, with more than 295,000 developers representing more than 200 countries.

"Programmers who make it to the TopCoder finals are in an extremely exclusive group," said Danny Sleator, professor of computer science. "They are selected from an immense pool that includes experienced participants from industry, as well as academia."

Both Oh and Conerly were members of the Dragons, CMU's team in the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest earlier this year.