Sharif University of Iran stood 18th at the 26th Annual ACM-ICPC World Finals. Also, Amir Kabir University of Iran received "Honorable Mention."

The contest was held from March 20-24, 2002 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Two teams from Iran participated in the finals:

Sharif University of Technology
Ramtin Khosravi, Coach
Ehsan Foroughi
Mohammad Toossi
Roozbeh Pournader

Amir Kabir University of Technology
Mohammad Kazem Akbari, Coach
Arash Rahimi
Babak Behsaz
Hamideh Vosoughpour

Sharif managed to defeat Caltech, Cornell, Chicago, UT Austin, Tokyo, and UCSD and earn the 18th title.

Contest Information:

The contest fosters creativity, teamwork, and innovation in building new software programs, and enables students to test their ability to perform under pressure. Quite simply, it is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest in the world.

The annual event is comprised of several levels of competition:

• Local Contests - Universities choose teams or hold local contests to select one or more teams to represent them at the next level of competition. Selection takes place from a field of over 100,000 students in computing disciplines worldwide.

• Preliminary Contests - Some teams compete in multi-university preliminary contests that advance teams to Regional Contests.

• Regional Contests (September to December) - This year, participation in preliminary and regional contests increased from 2,770 teams to 3,082 teams from 67 countries on six continents. Though the number of regional sites increased from 90 to 94, an additional 200 teams were turned away due to lack of space.

• World Finals (March 20-24, 2002 - Honolulu, Hawaii) - Sixty-four World Finalist teams will compete in Honolulu for awards, prizes and bragging rights. These teams represent 64 universities located in 27 countries on six continents.

Battle of the Brains

The contest pits teams of three university students against eight or more complex, real-world problems, with a grueling five-hour deadline. Huddled around a single computer, competitors race against the clock in a battle of logic, strategy and mental endurance.

Teammates collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds, and build software systems that solve the problems under the intense scrutiny of expert judges. For a well-versed computer science student, some of the problems require precision only. Others require a knowledge and understanding of advanced algorithms. Still others are simply too hard to solve - except, of course, for the world's brightest problem-solvers.

Judging is relentlessly strict. The students are given a problem statement - not a requirements document. They are given an example of test data, but they do not have access to the judges' test data and acceptance criteria. Each incorrect solution submitted is assessed a time penalty. You don't want to waste your customer's time when you are dealing with the supreme court of computing. The team that solves the most problems in the fewest attempts in the least cumulative time is declared the winner.

For additional information about the competition, please visit www.acmicpc.org.

Related Links:

Final Standings

26th Annual ACM-ICPC World Finals

... Payvand News - 3/24/02 ... --