A three-person Harvard team took eighth place in the 1999 World Finals of a prestigious programming contest held yesterday in the Netherlands.

Matthew S. Caywood '99, Russell S. Cox '00, and Joseph Turian '00 competed against 61 regional winners, the cream of a crop of nearly 2,000 worldwide teams, in the Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest.

Team coach and sponsor Robert L. Walton '66 said Harvard's eighth place finish continued its legacy of performing well in the competition.

"Harvard usually, but not always makes it to the finals. Harvard usually places in the top 20," he said.

"Any time you rank in the top 10, you've done very well. You have to have a really good day to actually win it," Walton said.

The team from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada took first place.

In yesterday's competition, each team--consisting of two undergraduates and one graduate student--had five hours to write a software program that solved six to eight real world computer problems.

The problems presented to the team could generally be solved using algorithms taught in undergraduate computer science courses, according to the competition's Web site.

There was a 20-minute penalty for each incorrect solution submitted.

To win, a team must solve the most problems as quickly as possible, and with the fewest attempts possible.

Students were allowed to program in Java, Pascal, C and C++ computer languages.

Before the World Finals, teams competed for the right to represent their school in the regional meets that occurred from October to December.

The winners of the 25 regional contests then competed this past weekend in Eindhoven.

The finalists included, for the first time, teams from Africa and Japan. The finals also included eight women, a record number.

Andrew Blumberg served as a second team coach.