BCS News - Victory to the swift

The winners of this year's BCS programming competition were a four-man team from Oxford University who described themselves as Something Stupid. Runners up were The C Hive from Sussex University.

The competition provides an opportunity to tackle software engineering tasks using C+ and C++ in a realistically simula-ted commercial environment. Oxford manager Nick Fortescue said: 'It was a fun day out and it was good to get some experience of non-academic competing.' Other team members were James Riden, Jeremy Robst and Boris Deianov.

Geoffrey Robinson, director of technology at IBM's Hursley research and development facility, presented the prizes and congratulated all the teams on taking part. Qualifying as one of the top 11 teams in the country was no mean feat, he added.

A record 37 teams took part in the six regional contests leading up to the final. Now in its 14th year, the contest is intended for twenty-something members of the BCS Young Professionals Group.

The final took place at Leeds University on 22 March and results were posted on the World Wide Web.

Each of the winners received a BCS shield and certificate, plus a copy of Microsoft's new Visual Studio97 software.