Archive notice: This article was originally published on September 26, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Six students were named national winners today at the final round of Germany’s National Computer Science Competition at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken. Robert Czechowski from Wiesbaden, Fabian Gundlach from Munich, Martin Maas from Lieskau near Halle, Aaron Montag from Baindlkirch near Augsburg, Eike Müller from Berlin and Oleg Yuschuk from Wertheim impressed the jury of representatives from education, business and research more than the other 28 finalists.
As a reward for their outstanding performance during the previous two days of competition, each receives €750 from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and support from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. More than 850 students took part in the competition overall. In addition to the national winners, six other participants received €500 each, and eleven special prizes were presented.
During the competition, the young talents demonstrated their expertise in individual interviews with the jury and in group work. Working as teams under time pressure, they had to implement various projects. On the first day, the students designed a complete software solution for courier services, including tracking individual consignments to their destinations and optimising delivery. The second day featured the theoretical game “Robbers and Police.”
The task was to assess how difficult particular problems are for computers to calculate. Professor Hans-Peter Seidel, Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, was pleased with the students’ commitment: “In every task, they demonstrated their talent for logical thinking and showed how difficult problems can be solved in a structured way. Ultimately, the point is that they should not merely operate the computer, but master it.” Dr Wolfgang Pohl, managing director of the competition, was very satisfied with this year’s high participation. “We attracted around 20 percent more students and deepened their interest in the foundations of information technology.”
This year the final round was expanded with a research day, during which participants worked on current research topics with scientists from Saarland University, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. “For many students, the National Computer Science Competition is the entry point for engaging intensively with how computer scientists think and the questions they address.
“We hope some participants will remain committed and study computer science after completing school,” said Professor Christoph Weidenbach, who organised the final in Saarbrücken and leads a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. In the past, Weidenbach—like two other computer-science professors, several researchers and some of Saarbrücken’s best computer-science students—had himself taken part in the final round.
The National Computer Science Competition has been held since 1980. It is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and supported by the education ministries of Germany’s federal states. It is organised by the German Informatics Society and the Fraunhofer Group for Information and Communication Technology. Its goal is to challenge and support outstanding talents who want not merely to use computers but to master them. Former winners include university professors and company founders.
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