Irvine : 1 Problem Trips Up UCI Computer Team

After spending precious time trying to crack a computer programming problem that contest organizers later admitted was worded incorrectly, the UC Irvine computer science team placed 14th this week in an international programming contest held in San Antonio.

“We wasted two hours on that” programming problem, Andrew Bliss, 21, said Thursday, shortly after the results of the Assn. for Computing Machinery contest were announced. “It was the first problem we tried to attack.”

Bliss and his three teammates were able to solve three of the eight programming problems given to the 25 university teams Wednesday in the International Computing Challenge. Stanford University’s team finished seven of the problems during the five-hour competition to become the 1991 world champions.

Besides Bliss, other UCI team members were Robert Hildenbrand, Chung Ng and Mark Taparauskas. They qualified for the international competition after placing second last November in the Southern California regional programming contest held in Las Vegas.

One problem said, “Given a map of a city and the location of the fire station, design a computer program that finds all possible routes to a given address of a fire.”

“The problems are fairly well known in computer science, and they dress them up with real-world situations,” Bliss said. “That one was real easy.”