N.J. Members of the Cornell team were David Kempe, a first-year doctoral student in computer science, Erik Dangremond, a senior in computer science, and Mike Smullens, a junior in biology.
Winners earn scholarships as well as bragging rights.
There were seven problems in the five-hour contest at Bloomfield, Sunday, Nov. 8, tackled by teams from colleges and universities in parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Cornell's was the only team to solve all seven problems, and it did so after only four hours. Each team in the contest is supplied with two Pentium computers and given a list of problems to solve. The simplest problem, Kempe said, was to find a match for a given phone number in a list of area codes. The most difficult, and the one that won the contest for Cornell, was to merge two very long character strings according to certain rules.