Over the next few days I'll be blogging live from Ekaterinburg, Russia, the site of the 38th Annual IBM-Sponsored ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals. Are you interested in some background on the contest? Check out this post from last year's World Finals in St. Petersburg, as it provides lots of great details about the history and structure of the ICPC.
This year's contest is hosted by Ural Federal University in Ekaterinburg, a vibrant city that straddles the border of the Asian and European continents. A thousand miles east of Moscow, the city is Russia's fourth largest and a prominent stop on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. With a well-deserved reputation as a center of innovation, the city is primed to play host to the ACM-ICPC World Finals.
The 122 teams participating in the World Finals emerged from local and regional ICPC competitions this past fall. Initially, selection took place from a field of more than 300,000 students in computing disciplines worldwide. A record number of students advanced to the regional level, as 32,043 contestants from 2,286 universities in 94 countries on six continents competed at more than 300 sites, all with the goal of earning one of the coveted 122 invitations to Russia. After record participation at the local and regional levels of the contest, this year's World Finals is poised to be the biggest and best ever!
The World Finals will take place from 10:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. local time on Wednesday (for those of you in the United States, Ekaterinburg is 10 hours ahead of Eastern Time). Before then, however, students will partake in numerous activities as they prepare for the intense competition.
I'll be back with more tomorrow!
Chas Kurtz is media liaison for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).
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