A team from Russia’s St. Petersburg State University (SPbU) has come out on top of the 40th International Collegiate Programming Contest of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM ICPC), beating 128 of their peers in the finals held at Prince of Songkla University in Thailand.
Coming ahead of teams from Harvard and the MIT, Russian students Stanislav Ershov, Igor Pyshkin and Alexey Gordeev managed to solve 11 problems out of 12 within a five-hour timeframe.
SPbU teams had already won the contest three times: in 2000 and in 2001, when their team included Nikolay Durov and Andrey Lopatin, who later became lead developers of the Vkontakte social network; and in 2014, when the contest was won by Egor Suvorov, Dmitry Egorov and Pavel Kunyavsky, who had been coached by Andrey Lopatin.
This year, the SPbU team was sponsored by leading Russian social network Vkontakte as well as by Victor Shaburov, founder of Looksery, a Ukrainian startup which was acquired by Snapchat last year.
Shaburov told East-West Digital News that he sponsored 10 teams from Russia and Ukraine in total. One of them, representing the Lviv (Lvov) National University, was ranked 11th.
All-time winners from Russia
In total, five Russian teams were awarded medals this year: Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology (MIPT) finished fourth and received a gold medal along with Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2nd) and Harvard University (3rd). Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were placed 6th, ahead of St. Petersburg ITMO University (7th) and Ural Federal University (8th). Ranked 10th, Nizhny Novgorod State University, coming from 400 km northeast of Moscow, got a bronze medal.
Russian teams have won the contest for five years straight now.
For the past three decades, the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest has been the most prestigious intellectual competition for young programmers in the world. Sponsored by IBM, the contest attracts each year tens of thousands of university students from a variety of countries.
The first team competition under the auspices of ACM was held at Texas A&M University in 1970. The contest evolved into its present form in 1977, with the first finals held in conjunction with the ACM Computer Science Conference.
