World Student Programming Championship for the first time in Russia

After last year’s victory of the SPbNU-ITMO team this year, the finals of the World Team Programming Championship (ACM ICPC) will be held in Russia for the first time.

The final of the 37th Student World Programming Contest of the Computer Engineering Association ACM International College Programming Contest 2013 will take place from June 30 to July 4. The host is the St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (SPNUU-ITMO). The event is sponsored by IBM.


After 12 days, the Yubileiny Sports Palace in St. Petersburg will host the best student sports programming teams. The final round will be held here July 3 from 9:30 to 15:00
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In 2013, 29,479 people participated in the qualifying rounds of the World Programming Championship. The teams (three people each) represented 2322 universities from 91 countries of the world. Over the past 15 years, the number of ACM ICPC participants has increased 12 times.



Competitions begin with a local selection of team members in computer faculties of universities. About 300,000 students participate in the selection. So ACM ICPC is the largest and most prestigious programming competition in the world.

In the current final, 120 participating teams are waiting for a five-hour marathon, during which they need to solve eight or more tasks of a high degree of complexity, having access to only one Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS Linux laptop for three. Food, drinks and any electronic devices in the play area are prohibited.

To solve problems you need to show deep knowledge of algorithms.

• Programming languages: Java 1.7.0_09, C / C ++ GCC 4.6.3 (Ubuntu / Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5).
• Development environments: Eclipse 4.2.1, CDT 8.1.1 under Eclipse 4.2.1.

See final schedule here .

SPbNIU-ITMO deserved the honor of holding the final competition. This is one of the few universities in the world that conducts targeted professional training of the sports programming team. The best sportsmen come here from all over Russia and even from other countries. For example, the three-time world champion in sports programming among schoolchildren, one of the leaders in the Codeforces and TopCoder ratings Gennady Korotkevich from Belarus, decided to enter SPbNU-ITMO. So, SPbNU-ITMO probably has many more victories ahead.

Vladimir Parfenov, dean of the Faculty of Information Technology and Programming at SPbNIU ITMO, noted that the global educational industry is not coping with the existing demand for IT specialists. “The burden on developers is so great that only young people can handle it,” he says. In Russia, all math-capable children are registered, starting from the fifth grade of school. However, the demographic situation is such that in 2012, talented high school graduates did not exceed 500 people, and in this - only 400.