PHILADELPHIA - A team of University of Pennsylvania students has set off to compete this weekend in the preliminary legs of the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest, a worldwide competition established almost 30 years ago.  The event is to be held tomorrow at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

The team is comprised of three seniors in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science, Douglas Kaminsky, Jared Martin and Paul Vernaza, led by coach Daniel Lee, an assistant professor in Penn's Department of Electrical Engineering.  All three teammates are members of the Science and Technology Wing, a residential-living program at Penn designed to help students advance their interests in science and technology.

The team faces a series of six to eight complex, real-world programming challenges to be completed in just five hours.  The problems are designed to test not only programming skill but also creativity and teamwork.  The team that solves the most problems correctly in the least amount of time emerges as the international champion.

"We are trying to identify which kinds of problems are most likely to appear in the competition given previous years' problem sets," Vernaza said. "Overall, this is part of our plan to minimize the number of surprises we encounter in the competition, and I think this will enable us to fare much better than we did last year."

This year, the regional contests are expected to draw tens of thousands of college participants on more than 3,000 teams from 68 countries during its preliminary rounds.  Worldwide, 1,493 schools, many with multiple teams, are competing.  In the Mid-Atlantic region in which Penn competes, 73 schools are are taking part. Seventy-two teams will be selected to compete at the 2004 World Finals, to be held March 28-April 1 in Prague.

Since the first finals were held at the ACM Computer Science Contest in 1977, the contest has expanded into a global network of universities hosting regional competitions that advance teams to the World Finals.

IBM has sponsored the event since 1997.