As midterms are starting to approach, while most students are looking for the right answer, the University of Wisconsin computer team has taken the name “Wrong Answer,” fairly ironic considering the team’s upcoming trip to China to participate in an elite world finals computing competition.

As part of UW’s ninth straight year in the finals, graduate students David He and Chris Hopman, who both went to last year’s final in Stockholm, Sweden, where they took 49th place, will be joined by junior Zef RosnBrick this year as team “Wrong Answer.”

The three students are gearing up to take on the world after dominating the regional round of the competition, beating more than 200 teams from Minnesota, Iowa, Western Ontario, Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Manitoba and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In all, 7,109 teams participated in the worldwide competition this year.

“This is my first year participating in this competition and it really is a great experience,” RosnBrick said. “The problems are really interesting to work on and I love being part of this team.”

“Wrong Answer” was the only team to answer all of the 10 questions presented at the regional competition. Now, however, they are facing much stiffer competition, up against some teams that have practiced on more than 1,000 problems, said associate professor of computer science Dieter Van Melkebeek, which is impressive considering that on average each question takes from 30 minutes to over an hour to complete.

“At universities in Asia and in Eastern Europe it’s an honor to be on one of these teams. They treat it much more importantly,” Van Melkebeek said. “Here, it’s a huge time commitment for students to participate in.”

Van Melkebeek and other coaches begin recruiting students through fliers, announcements and through classes they teach at the beginning of each fall semester. After they give the students placement tests, which are similar to those given in the competition, the students are chosen and put into teams.

Each week the teams meet to complete sample problem sets and discuss certain algorithms. Each problem set has a time limit of five hours, the same amount of time that the competition gives.

“Even after we meet during the week, there are times we will meet on the weekend for five or 10 hours even to work on extra problems,” RosnBrick said.

The way the competition works is there are eight to 10 problems given to each team. The team must then extract what exactly must be answered, figure out an algorithm that solves the problem and write the algorithm into a computer program that works with any data the judges input.

“This competition tests two skills: algorithm design and computer programming,” Van Melkebeek said.

The best finish a UW team has ever had at the World Finals was 11 out of 3,082 total competitors in 2002. Last year’s top finishers included St. Petersburg University in St. Petersburg, Russia and Tsinghua University of Beijing. This year’s top finisher will receive a prize of $10,000.