Student ACM chapters as well as undergraduate computer science departments should actively promote this competition as a way for students to develop their writing and tutorial skills. Papers should have been written in the previous two years and should not have been previously published in commercial publications. However, papers previously published in the ACM student mazazine Crossroads or in other student publications will be accepted. The paper should be accompanied by a letter from a faculty sponsor that certifies it as the work of the author or authors and describes the circumstances under which it was written. Authors should normally be undergraduates or graduate students with less than two years of graduate school and should normally be members of the ACM, but exceptions will be considered based on letters from the faculty sponsor.
International participation is encouraged, as in the student programming contest.
Submission for the 1999 competition are due by June 30, 1999. Students will make a recommendation to the Editors of Surveys by August 31, and the winner will be announced by October 31 and published in an issue of Surveys no later than the summer of 2000. It is desirable though not required that contestants indicate their intention to submit, with a provisional title. His submission was one of several high quality submissions to the contest. He is currently a PhD at the computer science department of Darmstadt University of Technology.