The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is a multitier, team-based, programming competition sponsored by IBM. It operates under the auspices of ACM and has its headquarters at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
ACM-ICPC
The 34rd 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 ran from September through December, with only 100 teams from around the globe qualifying for the World Finals February 1-5, 2010 in Harbin, China. Visit the official ACM-ICPC World Finals Web site to learn more.
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Read press releases
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Listen to the podcasts
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Check out the demos from the 2009 World finals
Battle of the Brains
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. Some problems require a knowledge and understanding of advanced algorithms. Still others are simply too hard to solve - except 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.
For more information on previous contests, and last year's final standings and problem sets, visit ICPC past contests or the IBM CAS Web site.
IBM sponsorship
Since IBM became the sponsor of the ACM-ICPC in 1997, the contest has increased by a factor of eight. 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.
IBM sponsorship of the ACM-ICPC is an important component of the company's many academic initiatives, which are designed to stimulate open-source programming skills to develop a more competitive IT workforce capable of driving global innovation and economic growth.