The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.

Not usually the first words that come to mind when the subject is computer programming.

But when the world’s elite athletes descend on Vancouver in February 2010, a team of University of Victoria computer science students hope to be in China, going head-to-head with some of the world’s best young coders.

Coming off a fourth-place finish at the Pacific-Northwest regional division competition two weeks ago, the UVic squad is hoping to lock up a wild card berth for the world finals of the Association for Computing Machinery’s International Collegiate Programming Contest in Harbin, China.

For Dan Sanders, a second-year student on the three-member team, competing at that level would be almost secondary.

“Just going to China itself would be among the top points. I haven’t really travelled much outside the country, so it will be a bit new for me,” he said.

If they make it – earning a trip to China hinges upon results from other regional competitions held later this month – Sanders and teammates Scott Porter and John Hawthorn would experience much more than just a chance to travel, said their coach, Sean Falconer.

“Once you’re accepted to the finals … all the guys will automatically get e-mails from companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM to see if they want to interview with them,” he said.

“Just to make it to the finals, it’s assumed that you have a certain level of talent, so the companies are very interested in hiring those people.”

The teammates practise twice a week, honing their skills on the type of problems they’re expected to solve during competitions.

Teams are given 10 problems and allotted five hours to write software to solve them. The problems are based on real-world applications, not just abstract mathematics, Falconer said.

One recent challenge the team was given was to come up with a program that could help track down somebody lost at sea, based on limited information.

“You knew where they were and then you have to triangulate where they actually are at sea or come up with the most probable region,” Falconer said.

The suspense of waiting to hear whether they’ve made the cut for China isn’t keeping Sanders up at night.

“I’m not a person who normally gets excited about most things, so it doesn’t do that for me. Some other people seem pretty excited though. I’ll get excited when I find out,” he said.

The team is unusual in that all three are undergraduates, Falconer said. That advantage of youth has Sanders confident that even if they don’t make the worlds this time, they will in 2011.

“We can only get better and some of the other main teams are going to be too old to compete next year.”

kvass@vicnews.com