Computer Science Professor Judges International Competition

Dr. John Bonomo, Westminster College associate professor of computer science, served as judge for the 31st annual International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals in Tokyo.

Eighty-eight teams of three gathered from around the world to compete with other regional winners. The winning team was Warsaw University from Poland, which solved eight problems. Second place went to Tsinghua University of China, followed by St. Pertersburg University of Information Technology of Russia, and MIT from the United States.

"In the world finals, each team was given a set of 10 problems and had five hours to solve as many of these problems as they could," Bonomo said. "I was the judge of problem J, which involved finding the cheapest way to trap a spy in an underground network of tunnels. It turns out that this problem was one of the harder ones - I received over 50 submissions for the problem during the five hours, but not one of them was correct."

Bonomo was a regional judge for seven years. He has been an international judge six times -- in Hawaii, San Antonio, Los Angeles, Prague, Shanghai, and Tokyo.

Bonomo, who has been with Westminster College since 1998, earned his undergraduate and master's degrees from Catholic University, and a master's and Ph.D. from Purdue University.

Contact Bonomo at (724) 946-7287 or e-mail bonomojp@westminster.edu for more information.

Dr. John Bonomo