AMPLE experience in co-operation gave students of the City University of Hong Kong the edge to outwit the other five local universities in a recent computer programming contest.
The winning team of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Hong Kong Scholastic Programming Contest comprised third-time participant Dicky Poon Chi-man, 21, Wilton Kwok Koon-wang, 21, who took part in the contest for the second time, and first-timer Tsang Chiu-tat, 25.
'Co-operation is imperative in the contest and I think having worked closely together previously did give us the advantage,' said Mr Poon, a second-year Computer Studies student.
In the contest, each team was presented with a set of problems and was required to solve as many as possible within four hours.
The best team was selected on the amount of time it took to complete the questions and the number of correct answers scored.
Two weeks before the contest, the City University team started experimenting with various strategies.
'At first we'd answer the questions individually, then we tried to do it together. One thinks about the problem-solving method, one mans the computer and the last one communicates between the two.