Warsaw University team wins programming contest

A team from Warsaw University has won ACM's 31st annual International Collegiate Programming Contest. (See also this and this.)

New York, NY - March 15, 2007 - The results of the 2007 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM ICPC) indicate the continuing strength of global competition for the best computer programmers in the world. The top five winners were Warsaw University (Poland), Tsinghua University (China), St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics (Russia), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S.), and Novosibirsk State University (Russia). This international competition, now in its 31st year, is hosted by ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery), a society of more than 83,000 computing educators, researchers, and professionals worldwide.

The international competition took place this week in Tokyo, Japan, with 88 teams competing in the final round. Earlier rounds of the competition featured more than 6,000 teams representing 1,765 universities from 82 countries.

The only U.S. university to finish in the top 10 was MIT, which placed 4th. Other top finishers from the U.S. were California Institute of Technology, at number 12, and the University of Texas at Dallas, which was tied for 14th place with 12 other schools.

I know one of the coaches of the winning team. Prof. Jan Madey is Vice-Rector of Warsaw University, but he has always found time to mentor exceptional students. His teams have done well in previous competitions (7th in 2006, 10th in 2004, World Champions in 2003, ...).

I met Jan in 1971 at the IFIP Congress in Ljubljana (then Yugoslavia, now Slovenia), and our paths have crossed many times since then, in Poland, the US, Canada, and assorted global sites. A wonderful person.