IN PRINT: Princeton coders #winning

Princeton stole the show at the first-ever New York Google Games last Saturday, which brought 175 students hailing from Columbia, NYU, Stony Brook, Rutgers, Princeton to Google’s NYC headquarters for some head-to-head competition.It was sort of like a heptathlon, but not one any track fans out there would recognize. Teams vied to be the first to finish challenges like geek trivia, a word association game, coding challenge, and gaming blitz.Michael Sobin, Alex Ogier, Jeff Hodes, Adam Hesterberg, and Frank Xiao took first  place, crushing Carnegie Mellon’s former speed record while completing an extra puzzle along the way. Hesterberg won the individual title as well, scoring a new tablet in addition to the Android phones each team member received.Another Tiger team - Xufan Zhang, Eddy Ferreira, Arman Suleimenov and Bohua Zhan, Edward Zhang – took second place, while Columbia ruined a would-be Princeton sweep.And while coders from the Ivy League and New York area are nothing to sneeze at, another group of Princeton programmers – Ferreira, John Pardon, Jarett Schwartz, and Zhan – will take on a whole new level of competition in May at the IBM ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition.Doug Heintzman, an executive at IBM, said it’s the Olympics of programming – “they’re like professional athletes.” The prizes are elite-level too – the top 12 teams get an open offer for a job at any of IBM’s offices worldwide. And at the qualifier, Princeton, which typically isn’t among the 18 US colleges invited to compete, nabbed not only the #1 spot for a ticket to the world championships, but also had teams take 2^nd, 6^th, and 13^th. Heintzman , clearly a fan of the athletics metaphor, said Princeton’s depth makes us a school to watch in the next couple of years.Welcome to the Ivy League, folks. We may never be a powerhouse in something the rest of the country considers a sport, but in academic athletics we’ll eat the people who crush us on the field/court/pitch for breakfast.Read more on Google Games at HuffPost Tech.