Eric Pabst will have to miss 10 days of school this fall, but he's not complaining. The 17-year-old East High student is heading for Argentina as part of a four-member team representing the United States in an international computer competition.
More than 170 contestants from 50 countries are expected to take part in the second International Olympiad in Informatics held in Mendoza, Argentina.Top math and computer students will be given problems to solve using IBM-compatible computers. These take up to five hours to complete as contestants create their own software programs.
An example: make a computer figure out the largest barn that could be built on a farmer's land without touching trees or other buildings.
Sounds simple, but it's tricky.
"The problems are challenging, but they're solvable," said Pabst, who finished calculus two years ago and plans to take university-level math courses this fall.
He ran into similar computer exercises at the national competition in June at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in Kenosha, Wis. There, 15 U.S. finalists squared off to see who would make it to the international event.
"I didn't know what to expect," Pabst said. "I thought I'd be dwarfed, but everybody was really friendly and we even helped each other so we'd all learn."
After studying Spanish for five years, Pabst said the thrill of seeing Argentina spurred him along in the preliminary rounds, but he didn't think he'd get this far.
He's always been fascinated by math and tuned into computers in seventh grade when he took first place in a state math contest. "I won a really cool calculator. You could make music with it, draw little figures and write tiny (computer) programs. That's what got me interested in programming."
His father got him started on a real computer soon afterward.
Pabst is the son of Valerie Buckman of Salt Lake City and Wendell Pabst, a computer programmer for First Security Bank in Boise, Idaho.
The Argentine trip is all-expenses-paid, with plane tickets purchased by the Center for Excellence in Education, a nonprofit organization in McLean, Va., and USENIX (UNIX Users Association). The Argentine government is hosting all 170 students, their adult supervisors and interpreters.
Pabst and the other American contestants will be accompanied by Don Piele, UW-Parkside associate professor of mathematics, who coordinates the competition in the United States.
It won't be all work and no play - Pabst will get a chance to indulge his love of cross-country and mountain biking and the team plans to take in the sights.
Their biggest competitors will be Chinese students, but Pabst said team members are heartened by the fact that the American team took two of 12 gold medals last year.
Will they get the gold this year?
"I hope so," he said.