Iowa State computer science students will be traveling to Phucket, Thailand to compete in the World Finals of a collegiate programming contest.

The Association of Computing Machines International Collegiate Programming Contest, or (ACM-ICPC) is held every year in a different country.

Iowa State has been to several different World Finals events in places like Russia, Poland and Morocco.

“It’s really hard for U.S. teams to do well,” said Mitra Simanta, coach for the ACM-ICPC teams and senior lecturer for the computer science department. “[Countries] like Europe, Russia and China, they treat this like the Olympics.”

To get to the World Finals, first the team had to compete in regionals. Iowa State attended regionals at the University of Lincoln Nebraska in November. From there, only three out of 270 teams progressed to the World Finals. About 20 teams in total are from the United States.

To get involved with the Iowa State ACM teams, students need to prove that they are one of the best programmers at the university.

“We have practice contests… on an individual basis,” Simanta said. “I first have [a student] solve three rounds of individual contest and find out who the top problem solvers [are].”

The competition is a huge event, where 120 teams from around the world sit in a room with their three-person team, a computer and a booklet of questions.

“You have to read the problem, understand it and write code to solve the problem,” Simanta said. “After five hours, [they see] which team solved the most problems and got [them] right.”

Simanta says that the questions these students will be answering range from geometry problems to data structures and algorithms.

“Our goal is to be one of the top 50 teams in the world,” Simanta said.

Iowa State students will be traveling to Thailand just after finals end, arriving May 15 and returning to Iowa State on May 20. The actual day of the event is May 19. The competition has live coverage on the ACM-ICPC website.