A team from Moscow State University has won the 42nd International Collegiate Programming Contest of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM ICPC) last week, defeating 140 international teams from 51 countries in the finals held on April 19 in Beijing, China.
This is the first victory for the university and the eighth triumph for the country.
With nine out of eleven tasks solved within a five-hour timeframe, the MSU students Mikhail Ipatov, Grigoriy Reznikov and Vladislav Makeyev left behind the three gold medal teams of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Peking University and the University of Tokyo.
Last year’s winner, St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (ITMO), walked out the ninth this time.
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.
