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St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics & Optics
Doug Heintzman, IBM Sponsorship Executive for the ACM-ICPC sponsorship, poses with the 2009 Championship team members and their coach as well as Bill Poucher, Executive Director of the ICPC, and Peter Gudmundson, President of KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Read all about it.
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The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), also known as the Battle of the Brains, challenges students to solve real-world computer programming problems under a grueling, five-hour deadline.
The competition nurtures next generation software engineers so they are prepared to solve world issues on planet earth. And refreshing IT skills and business sense are critical to IBM's leadership and continued growth.
Regional bouts run from September through December, with only 100 teams from around the globe reaching the World Finals. This year, the 33rd annual World Finals took place from April 18-22, 2009 in Stockholm, Sweden.
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Read stories from the press:
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Podcasts:
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Video Clips from YouTube - World Finals 2008:
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Learn more at the ACM contest Web site. |
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The 2009 World Finals adopted the theme of a smarter planet, with the problem set modeled after real world issues. For example, one problem asked competitors to create a smarter schedule that would enable a busy airport to safely land planes with long enough intervals while causing no congestion in the air, allowing for changing weather, and optimizing rush hour traffic on the ground (which can be affected by flight arrivals).
Most problems were solved during the competition - an encouraging sign of how our future generations exercise open computing technologies to challenge societal issues.
For complete details of this year's problem set, as well as problems from previous years, visit the World Finals problem archive.
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Stockholm gave the contestants and reporters a chance to witness in person how IBM's traffic management system worked. The IBM World Technology Showcase and the Technology Track presented other examples of the IBM vision for a smarter planet, including smarter water, a green data center and city management.
Visit the links below to learn more about some of the IBM smarter technology that was presented at the 2009 World Finals:
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The contest pits teams of three university students against eight or more complex, real-world problems,
with a five-hour deadline. Huddled around a single computer, competitors race against the clock in a
battle of logic, strategy and mental endurance.
Teammates collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds,
and build software systems that solve the problems under the intense scrutiny of expert judges. For a well-versed
computer science student, some of the problems require precision only. Others require a knowledge and understanding
of advanced algorithms. Still others are simply too hard to solve - except, of course, for the world's brightest
problem-solvers.
Judging is relentlessly strict. The students are given a problem statement - not a requirements document.
They are given an example of test data, but they do not have access to the judges' test data and acceptance criteria.
Each incorrect solution submitted is assessed a time penalty. The team that solves the most problems in the fewest attempts
in the least cumulative time is declared the winner.
The contest fosters creativity, teamwork, and innovation in building new software programs, and enables students to test their ability to perform under pressure. Quite simply, it is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest in the world.
For more information on previous contests, and last year's final standings and problem sets, please see
the ACM-ICPC World Finals Wiki.
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The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) traces its roots to a competition held at Texas A&M in 1970 hosted by the Alpha Chapter of the UPE Computer Science Honor Society. The idea quickly gained popularity within the United States and Canada as an innovative initiative to challenge the top students in the emerging field of computer science.
The contest evolved into a multi-tier competition with the first Finals held at the ACM Computer Science Conference in 1977. Operating under the auspices of ACM and headquartered at Baylor University since 1989, the contest has expanded into a global network of universities hosting regional competitions that advance teams to the ACM-ICPC World Finals.
Since IBM became the sponsor in 1997, the contest has increased by a factor of eight (8X). Participation has grown to involve several tens of thousands of the finest students and faculty in computing disciplines at 1,838 universities from 88 countries on six continents.
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IBM's sponsorship of the ACM-ICPC is an important component of the company's many academic initiatives, designed to stimulate open-source programming skills to develop a more competitive IT workforce capable of driving global innovation and economic growth.
For more information about other IBM college initiatives, please visit the
IBM Academic Initiative.
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