Georgia Tech's College of Computing "Yellow Jacket" team will compete in an all-out "battle of the brains" against the brightest collegiate programmers from around the world on March 28 - April 1, 2004 in Prague, Czech Republic. The 28th Annual ACM international Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC) is the most prestigious programming competition for the world's universities and colleges. The "Yellow Jacket" team, includes undergraduates Trayton Otto and Topraj Gurung and graduate student Ryan Wilson, along with team Coach David Van Brackle, and is one of only 25 North American teams scheduled to compete in the World Finals. The ACM regional competition this past October drew tens of thousands of college participants from 1,412 universities from 75 countries, and only seventy-three teams earned a coveted spot on the World Finals roster.

The team will face a series of six to eight complex, real-world programming challenges, to be completed in less than five hours. These grueling problems are designed to test not only programming skills, but also creativity and teamwork. Huddled around a single computer, competitors will race against the clock in a battle of logic, strategy and mental endurance. Teammates will collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds and build software systems that solve the problems under the intense scrutiny of expert judges. Linux1 and Eclipse2 provide the backbone for the contest-programming environment under an open source paradigm at this year's ACM-ICPC.

If the "Yellow Jackets" solve the most problems correctly in the least amount of time, they will be international collegiate programming champions and bring the championship back to the U.S. for the first time since 1997. Stay tuned for World Finals results or get the latest updates from http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/Finals/.
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1 Drawing on resources from across IBM and key IBM Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of e-business. For more information about IBM and Linux, visit www.ibm.com/linux. *Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.

2 Eclipse is an open platform for tool integration built by an open community of tool providers. Operating under an open source paradigm, with a common public license that provides royalty free source code and world wide redistribution rights, the eclipse platform provides tool developers with ultimate flexibility and control over their software technology. Visit www.eclipse.org<http://www.eclipse.org> to discover more!