Three teams of students from Sacramento State went to Stockton Saturday to participate in one of 32 regional competitions of the International Collegiate Programming Contest, also known as Battle of the Brains, which is hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery.

The Pacific Northwest Region had 80 participating teams from 36 different universities.Sac State’s top team at the competition placed 27th.

The top two placing teams from each regional competition will have the chance to participate in the World Finals in Shanghai, China.

Professor John Clevenger, the coach for the Sac State teams, was not able to attend the competition because he was in Portland, Oregon helping to simultaneously run the same competition at Portland State University.

“I’m here because the contest is run using a software system called PC-Squared, a package developed at Sac State. The judges this year are at the north site so I brought a small group of students and alumni here to assist,” Clevenger said.

According to the Sacramento State engineering and computer science Web site PC-Squared means Programming Contest Control and is a system that was developed at Sac State to conduct programming competitions by allowing participants to electronically submit their programs to judges who then run the program to check for accuracy and send the results back to the contestants.

The contestants at the three sites for the Pacific Northwest Regional Contest, BYU Hawaii, University of the Pacific, and Portland State University, are all able to submit their programs, which are electronically time stamped at the time of transmittal, to judges at the main site in Portland.

At the competition students were given six to eight programming problems that they had to solve within five hours. The teams with the best times for solving the problems will be sent on to the finals.

Joe Burks, the vice president of the Sac State chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, said each team in the competition was penalized 20 points for each time its program was submitted and found incorrect, but that the teams are able to rework the problem after each submission.

The participants from Sac State were chosen by a local contest that was hosted on campus Friday, Oct. 15.

The University of British Columbia took both of the top places at the Pacific Northwest Regional Competition, giving them an opportunity to compete in the World Finals in China.

“Students who participated in last year’s event felt that the questions for this year were much more difficult than last year,” Burks said.

The student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery still has other events planned for the spring and Burks said he would like to see Sac State host one of the regional competitions in the next few years, but that he will have to look into the feasibility of that option.

“Having seen UOP host the competition I think we could do a better job, but the question is whether we have enough room to host the event.” Burks said. It would require a space with enough computers to carry out the competition as well as space for competitors to take snack breaks, and to work problems without being in front of the computer he said.

Sac State will be hosting an Association for Computing Machinery competition for local high schools in the spring. It is an annual event for the organization, but Burks said it has not had a large number of schools participate in the past.

High schools do not often have courses that teach the programming skills needed to participate in one of these competitions, so Burks said he hopes to find a way to coach the students in the weeks before the competition to raise participation levels.