Mainland's hard drive pays off

The University of Hong Kong has been knocked off the leaderboard while Tsinghua University shone at the 31st World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest held in Tokyo this month.

Hong Kong's only representatives, Stephen Lai Kwok-fai, 22, Kelly Choi Sin-man, 19, and Lui Ka-cheong, 20, failed to capitalise on last year's success when HKU gained 12th place and a bronze medal.

Eighty-eight teams were selected to compete at the finals of the 'world's smartest trophy', having made their way through a field of 6,099 teams from 1,756 universities in 82 countries.

Students from Warsaw University in Poland were crowned world champions in the tournament where teams were given half a day to solve 'a semester's worth of computer programming problems'.

'We got stuck on one question,' said Mr Lai, a computer sciences student in his final year. 'We had difficulty identifying the easy ones. The problem was to create a plan to load containers on to ships in a set sequence as fast as possible. It looked easy but we seemed to suffer a mental block.

'We did manage to finish one puzzle, to work out how to slot marble balls into holes on a square board by tilting the board the fewest number of times. We felt pretty good about that.'