The University of Alberta has emerged as the top Canadian team at the 30th Annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) world finals held last month in San Antonio, Tex.
The Edmonton-based team placed second in North America, behind Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and eleventh among 83 teams worldwide. It was one of five Canadian university teams participating.
The competition involves three-member student teams who have five hours to answer ten questions — equivalent to a semester’s worth of programming problems — in front of a live audience, using languages like C++ and Java.
Saratov State University in Russia was crowned world champion as it solved the most problems correctly in the fastest time. Jagiellonian University, Poland came in second, while Altai State Technical University, also from Russia, came in third. All answered six questions correctly and received gold medals. Saratov did it the fastest and won US$10,060 for its efforts.