Sophomore Advances to $150,000 Computer Programming Tournament by Alex Pfeifer
Ben Wilhelm		APRIL 11, 2002 -- Oberlin College philosophy major Ben Wilhelm '04 will have a second opportunity to win $100,000. After winning the regional finals in the Sun Microsystems and TopCoder Collegiate Challenge, he has advanced to the final round of the competition, which has a total prize purse of $150,000. The tournament will be held at MIT on the weekend of April 19. Wilhelm won the Northeast Region Championship during the Regional Finals on March 13. Adam Loss, director of public relations at TopCoder, explains that Wilhelm's situation has drastically changed from the last tournament, where Wilhelm was a decided underdog, and this tournament, where he is "our top rated collegiate member, and a favorite heading into the finals." Wilhelm has not thought too much about what he would do with the prize money, should he win. "I'd like to visit Europe. And there is a friend I want to go on a road trip with." For Wilhelm, however, there are more reasons to participate in the competition than money. "I find the problems interesting," he says. "They're good practice. I'm a lot more accurate in other coding now than I used to be." Wilhelm has been competing in the online tournament since September 25. He has spent approximately two hours per week competing in elimination rounds against other programmers. Points are awarded during the competition for generating code written in the programming languages C++ and Java to solve problems quickly and accurately. Fellow competitors then scour one another's code for errors and inaccuracies. Sixteen competitors made it to the finals. Four are regional champions and the remaining twelve are wild card recipients, representing Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT, among other colleges and universities. TopCoder chairman and founder Jack Hughes said in a recent press release, "TopCoder has over 6000 collegiate members. These 16 have put in tremendous effort in order to elevate above a crowded field of the best and brightest." You can follow Wilhelm's progress in the tournament at the TopCoder website.
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