St. Petersburg Student Programmers Win 'World's Smartest' Trophy


Students from Russia's St. Petersburg State University of Information Technology, Mechanics & Optics won the title of World's Smartest at this year's International Collegiate Programming Contest.

For five hours last week 112 university teams put their coding skills to work to vie for title of World Champions in the 2012 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest. The "Battle of the Brains" programming challenge was tricky. Rather than creating programs that fit specific functional specs to generate the correct output, team participants had to develop a player that would compete in a game against other teams considering nine problems. According to a challenge overview, "Success is a result of developing and implementing a robust player with a sound strategy and correctly anticipating the strategies employed by one's opponents."

The teams had two weeks before the final challenge to develop their players. During that same period they could submit their player code and compete against opponents' players. Nightly updates of preliminary standings told them how they were doing. At the end of the coding phase, a double-elimination tournament determined the teams in the top four places.

Participants at the University of Warsaw-hosted event were culled from among 25,000 students who participated in regional contests around the world, each as part of a team of three.

The winners turned out to be three students from St. Petersburg State University of Information Technology, Mechanics & Optics in Russia.

How do universities create winning teams? "We recruit the best students," said U Warsaw coach Jan Madey in a video about the competition. U Warsaw's team won the competition in both 2003 and 2007 and took second place this year. "It's not enough to have three creative programmers. Each of them should a) be a good mathematician; b) [have] a good knowledge of algorithms; and c) be a very good programmer. Not only that, they have to be able to work together properly, to use the facts as a team, a team with limited resources. There might be a leader who is very fast at decisions; there might be someone who is very fast at typing; yet they should somehow be able to replace each other. So the best team is when each of them has a specialization plus they know how to work together."

Added player Wojciech Smietanka, "What I like about computer science is the possibility it gives to analyze and process a lot of data to solve hard problems to make computers serve us. And this is the thing that makes me crazy about computer science."

The champions have returned home with a "The World's Smartest Trophy," as well as a guaranteed offer of employment or internship with IBM, which sponsors the contest.

Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology and Shanghai's Jiao Tong University earned third and fourth places, respectively. All of the members of the top winning teams will receive job offers or internships. The top American finisher was Harvard University in seventh place.

There are three reasons IBM sponsors the programming competition, said Doug Heintzman, sponsorship executive: "The first is that these are the very best and brightest young people in the entire world, and we look forward to getting as many of them to become IBMers, to help us build the products to bring to market. The second is that we need them for the vitality of our entire industry. We need to encourage other people to pursue math and sciences in school. The third reason is that our planet faces very significant problems. We need to really get access to the best and brightest young elite problem solvers to help us build solutions for a smarter planet."

Next year's world finals will take place in St. Petersburg, Russia and will be hosted by this year's winners.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • person signing a bill at a desk with a faint glow around the document. A tablet and laptop are subtly visible in the background, with soft colors and minimal digital elements

    California Governor Signs AI Content Safeguards into Law

    California Governor Gavin Newsom has officially signed off on a series of landmark artificial intelligence bills, signaling the state’s latest efforts to regulate the burgeoning technology, particularly in response to the misuse of sexually explicit deepfakes. The legislation is aimed at mitigating the risks posed by AI-generated content, as concerns grow over the technology's potential to manipulate images, videos, and voices in ways that could cause significant harm.

  • glowing AI brain composed of geometric lines and nodes, encased within a protective shield of circuit patterns

    NIST's U.S. AI Safety Institute Announces Research Collaboration with Anthropic and OpenAI

    The U.S. AI Safety Institute, part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), has formalized agreements with AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI to collaborate on AI safety research, testing, and evaluation.

  • a glowing gaming controller, a digital tree structure, and an open book

    Report: Use of Game Engines Expands Beyond Gaming

    Game development technology is increasingly being utilized beyond its traditional gaming roots, according to the recently released annual "State of Game Development" report from development and DevOps solutions provider Perforce Software.

  • translucent lock composed of interconnected nodes and circuits at the center

    Cloud Security Alliance: Best Practices for Securing AI Systems

    The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not-for-profit organization whose mission statement is defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment, has released a new report offering guidance on securing systems that leverage large language models (LLMs) to address business challenges.