March 2006 Stories

Brains Over Brawn in Willamette Competition

Chris Hansen ’07 remembers when he came to campus for Willamette’s Computer Programming Contest, held each year for high schoolers in Oregon. Lunch was inhaled as the pace picked up and the minutes ticked down in the five-hour contest.

This year, as a computer science student at Willamette, Hansen and his fellow students served as judges. “I like being on the other side,” he says. “There’s a frantic amount of energy in the room, with everyone moving around and students running to the judges. If they have the wrong answer they have to go back and start over.

“It’s very empowering to win. The winning team gets serious bragging rights.”

Computer Science Professor Fritz Ruehr is the annual director of the contest, now in its 20th year. More than 50 high schools from Oregon have competed for the take-home prize—a trophy to put in the display case alongside the football and basketball trophies.

Four-member teams from each participating school bring their preferred computer language software and one computer. By allowing only one computer for each team, the contest mandates collaboration among the students. Teams tackle more than a dozen computer programming problems and points are given not only for correct solutions, but for style and flexibility.

“You have to be able to understand the problem well enough to explain it to a computer,” Ruehr says. “A computer has no intuition or common sense. A two-year-old child has more understanding.”

Ruehr tries to include at least two problems that even novices can solve, so that every team can feel good about its participation, but the top teams are challenged with problems appropriate for advanced college students. “It’s pure puzzle, pure thinking,” Ruehr says.

Some years there are problems no team can solve, and one year a team solved all 14 problems in four hours, an unprecedented feat. They were packing up their computer when their high school coach came running into the room saying, “What are you doing?”

“There’s an overt attempt on the part of the contest organizers to provide trophies that look like sports trophies,” Ruehr says. “We want to have these kids be able to bring these things home and put them in the high school trophy case and get recognition for intelligence.”

“High schoolers often value athletic prowess and beauty over intelligence,” Ruehr says. “Before, ‘being geeky’ was a put down, but with the Internet boom, academic prowess and technical skills have become respectable, in the way that athleticism has always been.”

The new cultural shift is reflected in the TV show “Beauty and the Geek.” Willamette graduate Eric Chase ’04 recently appeared on the show, wooed by three beautiful women. It’s unfortunate, Ruehr says, that the show neglects to portray women as having technical skills too.

Ruehr volunteers one-on-one with seniors in the Salem-Keizer School District, mentoring teens that have computer science aspirations.

The annual Willamette Computer Programming Contest is sponsored by Willamette University and the Software Association of Oregon Foundation in an effort to encourage students to develop computer science skills.

Like Father, Like Son

Junpei Sekino’s father was one of the most well-respected printmakers in Japan, and had hopes that his son would become an artist as well. His son had an immense amount of talent, winning first place in the junior division of a national Japanese printmaking contest at age 10. But instead of wood blocks and ink, Junpei took up math equations and computers as he grew older.

In 1985, seven years after Sekino came to Willamette to teach math, he adopted his father’s trade, in a round-about way. He began programming his computer to create stunning fractal images based on equations. His computer art is now recognized across the world, with his “fractal gallery” in fourth place on Google—out of 1,800,000 entries. Encyclopedia Britannica lists it as one of the “Web’s Best Sites.”

Sekino types in an equation, pushes the start button and waits for the image to blossom on his screen. When he took up high-tech art 21 years ago, computers worked in slow motion, often taking an entire night to generate an image. Now his computer can process most images in several minutes, although some images are so complex they take 10 days of computing time.

The black and white palette Sekino worked with when he began has evolved into a palette of 16 million colors, enough to create three-dimensional images and build luster and brilliance. Many of his artworks are reminiscent of the traditional Asian paintings he knew as a child.

“There are deep similarities between math and art,” Sekino says. “Paintings always contain three-dimensional spaciousness and geometric balance, which should be the centerpiece of fractal images as well. And a math argument has to be beautiful. It can’t be cluttered.”

Sekino himself is an uncluttered man. He carries an aura of peace, perhaps gained from a war-torn childhood that gave him an appreciation of simple things. Born in 1942 in Tokyo, he experienced food shortages during WWII. “Everybody was hungry, everybody was suffering, but that didn’t make us kids unhappy, probably because we were all in the same boat.

“As a kid I was happy because I had open fields to play in with my friends. Most of the houses were burnt down during the war and cleared up, so we could run around and the hardworking adults never betrayed us. It was very healthy.”

Sekino’s father died before he saw his son’s art, but Sekino believes his father would have been pleased. The math professor will retire at the end of this year and pour his energies into his own sons, 10 and 12. “I want to spend a lot of time with them, before they become teenagers and stop intermingling with their parents.” He’ll play baseball with his children, hunt for mushrooms in the mountains with his wife, and create magical places onscreen where children of all ages can wander.

Additional images and a more in-depth story about Junpei Sekino will appear in the upcoming edition of The Scene, Willamette University’s alumni magazine.