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The Battle of the Brains is on for a trio of Simon Fraser University problem solvers.

They’re heading to Egypt in February for the finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) – after learning that their third place finish in a regional competition should have been a first place win. The top two teams advance to the final.

The judging of November’s Pacific Northwest Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) regional competition was reviewed after it was discovered that incorrect judging data was used.

That cast doubt over the results of one of the 11 brain-numbing questions that the 74 teams tried to solve. The SFU team tried to solve it an exasperating 25 times, only to learn that they had actually got the answer right after their third attempt.

“We’ve been sitting on pins and needles for a long month waiting for word on this,” says Brad Bart, a senior computing lecturer at SFU and the team’s coach. “It might be a hard pill for some teams to swallow. But we deserved the win.”

Teammates Hua Huang, Wesley May and Andrew Henrey practiced for five hours at a stretch for several days over six weeks to prepare for the regional contest. All have competed previously for SFU, which has gone to the finals four times.

The winner of the competition, sponsored by IBM, receives what the company dubs “The World’s Smartest Trophy.”

The students have their approach to problems down to a fine art. Henrey, a statistics whiz and grad student, handles the math involved while computing undergrad May tackles the programming and Huang, a graduate student from China, handles the “tougher” programming.

“We have a good chemistry and a love for solving problems,” says May. Henrey admits to spending more time working on problems than he does on his homework – and has no intention of taking a break over Christmas.

“A typical problem might be something like, ‘what’s the shortest path from A to B – given a whole bunch of irritating constraints along the way?’” says Henrey. “Good and challenging.”

The team solved eight of the 11 problems in the regional contest, initially won by underdogs California State University Chico, (CSUC) which overtook Stanford University in the dying seconds. Stanford has since been bumped to third while SFU and CSUC move on.

In Egypt, the SFU team will be one of 100 battling to be the brainiest, many from Eastern Europe and Asia where the competition can be of near Olympic status.

“It will be tough,” says Bart, who has coached teams for 10 years and formerly competed as a student. “Besides the brains, we’ll need confidence. And maybe luck.”

In all more than 8,000 universities take part in the annual competition, now in its 35^th year.

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