The Russians were the victors at the recent Banff-based, IBM-sponsored Associating for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest.
The St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics, and Optics three-student team won the “Battle of the Brains” by completing eight out of 11 computer programming questions–a semester’s worth of problems–over five hours.
The subject matter of the questions encompassed a semester’s amount of work, and included designing code to determine the length of a city skyline, map the size and capacity of a new building design, and provide support for an embedded neural network of cell phones.
The winners will get IBM prizes and scholarships. The top 12 teams included a Canadian school—the University of Waterloo got a bronze medal by placing ninth.