Students from St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics have been crowned the 2009 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Champions. The 2009 World Finals Awards Ceremony took place in the Stockholm Concert Hall where the Nobel Prizes are presented every year. KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden hosted this year's event.
Referred to as "The Battle of the Brains," the ACM-ICPC World Finals challenged the world's top 100 university teams to use open standard technology in designing software that solves real-world problems. The teams were awarded medals based on the number of problems they solved correctly in the shortest amount of time.
100 teams competed in this year's final round. Earlier rounds of the competition featured 7,109 teams representing 1,838 universities from 88 countries.
Of the top 12 winners at the 2009 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM ICPC) competing for the best computer programmers in the world, four teams were from Russian universities, one was from Georgia (a former member of the USSR), one team was from China, and three were teams representing universities in North America, including Canada and the United States. First place went to St. Petersburg University of Information Technology, Mechanics and Optics (Russia) for the second year in a row, followed by Tsinghua University (China), St. Petersburg State University (Russia), Saratov State University (Russia), the University of Oxford (UK), and Zhejiang University (China).
In North America, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S.) finished in seventh place, followed by Altai State Technical University (Russia), University of Warsaw (Poland), University of Waterloo (Canada), I Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University (Georgia) and Carnegie Mellon University (U.S.). This international competition, now in its 33rd year, has been run by ACM, a society of 94,000 computing educators, researchers, and professionals worldwide, since the mid 1970's as the premiere programming competition. Financial and systems support for the competition is provided by IBM.
