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St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics & Optics
Doug Heintzman, IBM Sponsorship Executive for the ACM-ICPC sponsorship, poses with the Championship team members and their coach, and Bill Poucher, Executive Director of the ICPC.
Read all about it.
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The 32nd ACM International Collegiate
Programming Contest (ICPC), also know as the Battle of the Brains, challenges students to solve real-world computer programming problems under a grueling, five-hour deadline.
Regional bouts run from September through December,
with only 100 teams from around the globe reaching the World Finals on April 6-10, 2008 in Banff Springs, Alberta, Canada.
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Video Clips from YouTube:
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Podcasts:
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Learn more at the ACM contest Web site. |
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The contest pits teams of three university students against eight or more complex, real-world problems,
with a grueling 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. You don't want to waste your customer's time when you
are dealing with the supreme court of computing. The team that solves the most problems in the fewest attempts
in the least cumulative time is declared the winner.
For more information on previous contests, and last year's final standings and problem sets, please see the
the ICPC past contests page or the
ACM contest page on the IBM CAS Web site.
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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 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 1,821 universities from 83 countries on six continents.
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.
The annual event is comprised of several levels of competition: - Local Contests — Universities choose teams or hold local contests to select one or more teams to represent them at the next level of competition. Selection takes place from a field of over 300,000 students in computing disciplines worldwide.
- Regional Contests (September to December 2007) — This year, participation increased by 10% from 6,099 to 6,700 teams representing 1,821 universities from 83 countries on six continents, not counting numerous teams competing in preliminaries.
- World Finals (April 6-10, 2008, Fairmont Banff Springs, Alberta) — To celebrate the 100th Centenary of host the University of Alberta, one hundred (100) world finalist teams will compete for awards, prizes and bragging rights. These teams represent the best of the finest universities on six continents - the cream of the crop.
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ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is an educational and scientific society uniting the world's computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges. ACM strengthens the profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.
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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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