Consider it Carnegie Mellon University's version of "The DaVinci Code" or "Indiana Jones" flicks, but with computer codes and puzzles replacing villains and rolling boulders.

CMU's heralded Computer Science Department was chosen this year to create a contest for the ninth annual programming contest of the ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming to be held Sept. 18-20 in Portland, Ore.

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Keepers of the code: From left, Chris Casinghino, Tom Murphy VII, Daniel Spoonhower, professor Robert Harper and Daniel Licata stop in Dr. Harper's office at Carnegie Mellon University. Click photo for larger image.

Each year, the contest attracts computer scientists worldwide to compete for supreme bragging rights -- and a token cash prize -- in writing computer programs, solving computer problems and making their trusty computers operate more efficiently than their competitors'.

But this year, CMU created a contest that raised the bar, or should one say "cursor," along with some eyebrows. It's no surprise considering that U.S. News & World Report this year ranked CMU's doctoral program in computer science and its programming languages group as the nation's best.

A team of three doctoral students and one undergraduate computer scientist worked six months to produce a movie-like plot involving a fictional ancient codex and Rosetta stone.

Participants then had 72 hours, from noon July 21 to noon July 24, to use scant clues to solve the codex to activate a fictional ancient computer, which in turn was used to help solve eight puzzles. Many teams worked around the clock for three days to try solving the puzzles.

As it turned out, the contest proved so riveting that many computer-programming teams crashed. Computer geeks freaked. Some nerds deferred.

"Like most competitions with no real point, people kill themselves to win it," Dr. Robert Harper, CMU professor of computer science who sponsored the project. "We set the bar very high.

"The tremendously sophisticated work they did to develop the software was extraordinary," he said of his team. "People were staggered by the sophistication of it."

That's to say, the buzz was electric. Contestants even resorted to discussing the contest in chat rooms.

But by the reactions CMU received, most computer scientists reveled in the challenge and praised CMU's talent and programming gumption.

"The ICFP contest is always a great event, but this year's version really stood out," said Tom Duff, a pioneering developer at Pixar Animation Studios. "Most years the contest revolves around a really complex, quirky, optimization puzzle, but this year we got a double handful of moderately complex puzzles, which makes a better contest.

"The presentation was stunning and hilarious," he said. "It was like a scavenger hunt in a virtual 'Lost World' populated by antediluvian computer scientists."

CMU's made-up contest theme was "computational archaeolinguistics" -- a fictional narrative developed by programmers Daniel Spoonhower of Rochester, N.Y., Tom Murphy VII of Hamden, Conn., and Daniel Licata of Buffalo, N.Y., all CMU students in the Ph.D. computer science program, along with CMU senior Chris Casinghino of Manchester, N.H.

Dr. Harper and Dr. Karl Crary, an associate professor in the computer science department, guided their progress.

Dim the lights as the plot unfolds:

A fictional ancient society devoted to the study of programming and computation was active in the Pittsburgh region more than 2,000 years ago, long before the invention of digital computers, as the story goes.

Then, several decades ago, during construction of the Monroeville Mall, workers found the Monroeville Codex, which no one could decipher. So it was stashed away in a CMU basement.

But during construction of CMU's Gates Center for Computer Science, workers find a Rosetta stone that provides clues that enables researchers to decipher the codex.

Based on that fictional account, contestants had to work through confounding computer language code, using their best forensic skills, to unlock the codex, or ancient text, to gain clues to build the ancient computer.

Once the ancient computer was recreated, teams used it to solve eight independent computer language puzzles based on research, popular culture and computer game lore.

The CMU team filled each puzzle with computer-science gags and parodies of past ICFP contests. Understand, this is not PlayStation or Xbox. It's all computer text, but text that raises the pulse of computer scientists worldwide.

Of 900 teams that registered, 364 entered and solved the codex and opened the "ancient" computer. About 150 teams made substantial progress on one or more of the eight puzzles.

The 364 teams beat the previous contest record of 214 entrants in 2004. The contest was so challenging that 60 teams entered in the final 24 hours of the 72-hour contest to give it a whirl without any real chance of winning.

Team names reflect hacker creativity: White Mice Who Built the Earth, Toasted Monkeys, Pretend Robot Pants, Purple Monkey Dishwasher and Lethargic Orangutan Linguists, among them.

Contest organizers will announce the winners during the ICFP conference, and the CMU team will explain how it developed the contest.

CMU plans to keep the Web site -- www.icfpcontest.org -- available indefinitely because of its worldwide popularity.

"The brilliant thing the CMU group did was put together a suite of eight problems of varying degrees of difficulty, and I would say, as a bonus, about half the problems had very strong connections to functional programming that connected fairly nicely to the sponsoring organization. I'm sure the ICPF is thrilled," said Norman Ramsey, Harvard University associate professor of computer science and a contest participant and former contest creator.

"There's no one area where special knowledge in one area would be guaranteed victory," he said, adding that the contest will be a good computer-science teaching tool. "It will be hard to recruit someone to do next year's contest. People are going to have to think much harder."

Although the winner gets bragging rights, the entertaining albeit complicated contest bolsters CMU's reputation.

"In the level of programming languages, we already know these guys are among the very best, and this will confirm that," Dr. Ramsey said. "People will be talking about this for quite a while."

Dr. Harper said the contest proves his students "really know how to write good code.

"It was a great display of CMU leadership in the field," he said. "For me, it was a demonstration of the prowess of our group. They made us all look very good."

Or as Dr. Harper explained, "I like to think that the smartest people use the best tools."