Three teams of University of Nebraska-Lincoln student computer programmers placed in the top 10 in the Oct. 31 North Central North America Regional competition of the IBM-sponsored Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest.

Thirty-seven teams from 14 schools were on the UNL campus Oct. 31 for the 5-hour competition. Teams came from colleges and universities in Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska and Kansas.

The UNL site for this competition has grown in recent years to be by far the largest of the approximately dozen sites that run the contest simultaneously, connected by computer networks. Approximately 200 teams of three students each competed across the entire region that encompasses six states and two Canadian provinces. The top team in each region is automatically promoted to the World Finals, to be held Feb. 1-6 in Harbin, China. Additional wild card teams, typically 2 or 3 from this region, are invited to round out the top 100 teams at the World Finals.

The coach of the UNL teams and director of the UNL site, professor Charles Riedesel, has had teams advance from the regional level to the World Finals in seven of the past 11 years, and said he expects this to improve to eight in 12 years through the second-place regional finish of UNL's top team, the Incendiary Pigs. Riedesel said confirmation should come in the next couple of weeks.

The Incendiary Pigs team of seniors Tim Echtenkamp (Cairo), Tyler Lemburg (Dannebrog) and Steve Trout (Batavia, Ill.) won the regional last year to qualify for the World Finals. Last year, the team placed first in the region, just ahead of a team from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, but this year the results were reversed.

Other top-10 UNL teams were:

* '; DROP TABLE TEAMS: Seniors Justin Popek (Firth), Chris Rummel (Dickinson, N.D.) and Alan Wigness (Fortuna, N.D.) placed third at the UNL site and sixth in the region with six of the 10 problems solved.

* Phelpsian I|t: Juniors John Benes (Omaha), Dylan Douglas (Sidney) and Justin Hicks (Spearfish, S.D.) placed fourth at the UNL site and seventh in the region with six of the 10 problems solved.

Other UNL teams in the top half of the region were:

* ThreadDeath: Freshmen Alec Johnston (Peoria, Ill.), Chris Johnson (Parkville, Mo.) and Clay Upton (Lincoln), 15th at the UNL site and 55th in the region.

* Estrogen Attack: Karri Huismann (Omaha), Emily Munderloh (Omaha) and Anne Neilsen (Wamego, Kan.), 16th at the UNL site and 57th in the region.

* Audrey II: Freshmen Alex Estes (Omaha), Megan Vokal (Bellevue) and Gregory Schafer (Highlands Ranch, Colo.), 18th at the UNL site and 74th in the region.

The remaining team, Smiley Faces :), composed of Lincoln freshmen Neema Bahramzad, Nick Doty and Calvin Pappas, earned an honorable mention.

All of the students on the UNL teams except Lemburg on Incendiary Pigs and Pappas on Smiley Faces :) are enrolled in the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management.

For complete results, go to http://cs.unomaha.edu/~acmregn/rankorder.html and http://cs.unomaha.edu/~acmregn/siteorder.html. For the links to the problems, rules and other information, go to http://cse.unl.edu/~xu/acm.