A SUFFOLK student has calculated success by being named runner-up in a national computer programming contest.

Patrick Stevens, who finished his A-levels at Woodbridge School last term, was announced runner-up of the Wolfram Programming Challenge with his visualisation of five “sorting algorithms”.

Given a list of random numbers from one to 70, the 18-year-old showed how different methods would rearrange the list into numerical order.

Patrick said: “A friend of mine is studying maths at university and was having trouble understanding how sorting algorithms work. I chose the topic because I thought a visualisation might be useful. However, I didn’t expect to be placed runner-up.”