April 10, 2008
'Battle of the Brains' Crowns Top Computing College
And the winner is….the St. Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics!
The Russian university emerged yesterday as the home of the top computer whizzes in the “Battle of the Brains,” also known as the Association for Computing Machinery’s International Collegiate Programming Contest, which is sponsored by IBM.
In the contest, each team of three students is given 11 computer programming problems, and only five hours in which to write software to solve them. The challenges included writing code to determine the length of a city skyline, map the size and capacity of a new building design, and cracking an encrypted file to obtain the top secret information it holds.
St. Petersburg State solved eight of the 11 problems, edging out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose team solved seven.
The top 10 institutions —out of 1,821 whose teams entered the preliminary rounds of the contest — were:
1: St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics
2: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3: Izhevsk State Technical University
4: Lviv National University
5: Moscow State University
6: Tsinghua University
7: Stanford University
8: University of Zagreb
9: University of Waterloo
10: Petrozavodsk State University
—Josh Fischman
Posted on Thursday April 10, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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Hey! I love OBSKP! They r my babies!
— Kaylyn Apr 10, 07:21 PM #
Do the same contest and give students 3 weeks—how does that change the meaning of the results? It is unlikely that any of the groups programmed.
— Richard Tabor Greene Apr 11, 07:49 AM #
Brackets! Brackets! Let’s not waste this exciting opportunity to have another office pool! University of Waterloo?????????
— the first marci Apr 11, 11:54 AM #
Let’s not elevate quick hacking to the “battle of the brains”. The students are likely quite bright, but I wouldn’t use that test as the criteria for who I would want to do research with me in CS. There are plenty of other more important skills I would want to see.
— Kim Apr 11, 05:07 PM #
I’d want to see the kind of tuition they’re paying at St. Pete U, compared to MIT.
— G. Hedemann Apr 11, 08:55 PM #
Post the problems!
— Sam Apr 11, 09:49 PM #
Here’s a link to the problems: http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/Finals/2008WorldFinalsProblemSet.pdf
— Joe Apr 27, 08:38 PM #