Who Is Winning The Real Cyber War?

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“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind,” said Sir Winston Churchill at Harvard University in 1943. He frequently spoke of humanity’s minds in descriptions of the future and this is such an important point. It is our brains that give us both the vision for what we want the future to be and the capacity to make that future.

Please consider the above and join me in congratulating the St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics for their May 2012 victory of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. This contest, known as the “Battle of the Brains” in global computer programming, is a multi-tiered competitive programming competition among all the world’s universities that operates under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and is supported by Baylor university (see ACM-ICPC’s site here).

This contest has its roots in a competition started in 1970 at Texas A&M as a way of fostering creativity teamwork and innovation. Students tackle real world problems and race against the clock in competitions designed to show the best programming teams. This really is a battle of the brains.

Along with our hearty congratulations to St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics for their first place win, we should also congratulate the 2nd, 3rd and 4th place winners of this contest, University of Warsaw, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Congrats to all!

There was a time when the US dominated this award. But here is the list of winners since 1991

Years
Year Country Institution
2012 Russia Saint Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics
2011 China Zhejiang University
2010 China Shanghai Jiao Tong University
2009 Russia Saint Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics
2008 Russia Saint Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics
2007 Poland University of Warsaw
2006 Russia Saratov State University
2005 China Shanghai Jiao Tong University
2004 Russia Saint Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics
2003 Poland University of Warsaw
2002 China Shanghai Jiao Tong University
2001 Russia St. Petersburg State University
2000 Russia St. Petersburg State University
1999 Canada University of Waterloo
1998 Czech Republic Charles University
1997 United States Harvey Mudd College
1996 United States University of California, Berkeley
1995 Germany Albert-Ludwigs-Universität
1994 Canada University of Waterloo
1993 United States Harvard University
1992 Australia University of Melbourne
1991 United States Stanford University

I think I should end this post here and let you dwell on the significance of the above.


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