The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is the toughest coding competition among university students. Participating teams consist of three contestants sharing a single computer for five grueling hours.

This year, only eighty teams made to the ACM-ICPC World Finals from nearly 1,500 universities in over 70 countries. There were a total of ten problems to be solved in five hours. Here are some of the questions:

• Write a program that computes how the gears of a clock can be connected with an hour and a minute hand, based on a provided input shaft speed with a maximum of three gears per shaft.

• Create a program that can find the maximum numbers of degrees of separation for a network of people.

• Develop a system to interconnect different nodes of a corporate network in the cheapest possible way.

As each team solved a problem, a colored balloon rose above their table to let rivals and spectators know where they stood. The Saratov State University of Russia won the 2006 ACM-ICPC World Finals

Programming Environment | Final Teams

Official Home: ACM Contest Website

Source: Battle of the Brains