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Last month, students from one hundred and three universities in eighty-eight countries took part in an
international computer programming contest, which took place in Harbin, China. Three-person teams
from each school had five hours to solve eleven real world problems.
The students first listed the problems in order of difficulty. Then they figured out the requirements of
each. They designed ways to test their solutions. And they wrote the needed software systems. Even the
winning team from Shanghai Jiaotong University in China was not able to solve all the problems within the
given limit. Stanford's team solved five problems and finished in fourteenth place. Stanford was one of
twenty-one American universities that took part in the contest this year.
The official name of the Battle of the Brains is the ACM International Collegiate Contest. The first final competition was held in 1977 at the Association for Computer Machinery Computer Science Conference. Today, a network of universities holds area competitions that send the winners to the world finals, now
organized by IBM.
Contest spokesman Dong Heintzman says the world champions receive prizes and scholarships. They
are also guaranteed an offer of employment or internship (实习) with IBM. He said, "We have had past
world champions that IBM has gone and employed in our Zurich research laboratory and are now
working on some of the leading edge materials in science and physics. We have a world finalist from
China who's been working on the Watson Supercomputer that in the near future will be playing Jeopardy (一种超级计算机名称) against the best Jeopardy players in the world. So this competition is an
opportunity to be recognized and to be recruited (招聘) by some of the top technology and research
firms around the world."
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