The ongoing turmoil in Egypt has put the kibosh on Canadian computer science teams’ plans to travel to the country to participate in the so-called Battle of the Brains, the finals for which were scheduled to take place in Cairo this month.
Teams from the University of Waterloo, Simon Fraser University, and the University of Alberta, which all placed in the finals, are waiting to hear where the contest will be re-located.
Brad Bart, a senior computing lecturer and the head coach for the SFU team, says his students are disappointed about the cancellation but remain optimistic.
“I think they were excited to get to go to somewhere as exotic as Egypt. But they still get to compete, so, we’re kind of waiting to see where the chips fall, where they’re going to hold the contest and when. Hopefully it will be somewhere as exciting,” he says.
The International Collegiate Programming Contest challenges the world’s top university computer science teams to use open standard technology in designing software that solves real-world problems. Each team of three students faces 8-12 programming conundrums with varying degrees of difficulty.
This year the SFU team overcame many challenges to win in the Association of Computation Machinery regional placement competition. The team was told after a judging error was found that although they had tried to solve the equations 25 times, that they had already won on the third try.
Their win qualified them for the finals, beating out stiff competition from prestigious universities like Stanford, Berkley, and even hometown rivals the University of British Columbia.
Sponsored by IBM, the contest is a high-stakes competition for students, who if they win receive scholarships and internships or employment with IBM—not to mention prestige.
But Bart says the students are not the only ones who stand to profit from the competition.
“IBM is a worldwide company, so their efforts are trying to hire the best students in the world, and they happen to have 300 of the best students in the world when they hold the competition. So they get exposure—it’s kind of a win-win for both parties,” he says.
“It really means a lot to compete in these things for students.”
Students commit to intensive study schedules to prepare for the competition, some spending hours every day doing practice problem-solving. During the finals, students must create computer programs from scratch in order to solve problems within a five-hour limit.
“There’s a lot of preparation,” says Bart, who has coached teams for 10 years and formerly competed as a student. “It’s pretty intense ... there’s a lot of pressure.”
The finals are held in a different country each year, with previous years hosted in China and Stockholm. Next year’s event is scheduled for Moscow.
The competition was started in the 1970s in order to foster innovation in emerging computer science fields. Since IBM became the official sponsor in 1997, the ICPC has grown to include over 30,000 students and faculty in computing disciplines from over 2,000 universities in 88 countries on six continents.
Bart says they haven’t been told where the competition will be moved to. The delay “just gives us an extra couple of months, probably, to prepare until they relocate.”
Wherever it’s held, the Canadian teams will find themselves battling the brainiest, many from Eastern Europe and Asia where the competition can be of near Olympic status.