São Paulo – Students from five Brazilian universities will take part, next Wednesday (20th), in the finals of the worldwide programming competition ACM-ICPC, organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), to be held in Marrakesh, Morocco. The acronym ICPC means International Collegiate Programming Contest.
The finals will have 128 teams competing, each with three students, from universities worldwide. According to information from the event’s organization, Brazil will be represented by groups from Universidade de São Paulo, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
This is the first time that ACM, which is based in the United States, promotes its contest in the African continent. In the competition, the groups need to solve real programming problems in a period of five hours. The teams that reached the finals were selected from more than 38,000 registered contestants, from 2,500 universities in 101 countries. Among the Arab nations, there are groups representing universities from Morocco, Egypt and Syria.
“In 1970, the ACM-ICPC began as a competition among the universities of Texas and has transformed into a worldwide phenomenon over the past four decades, said Dr. Bill Poucher, ICPC Executive Director, in a statement.
“This year further illustrates the global nature of the contest with the first World Finals in Africa. We’re thrilled to open doors of opportunity for these talented young students as they put their creativity and technical expertise to the test to tackle real world challenges in a competitive environment”, he added.
With more than 100,000 members, ACM is the biggest association in the computing field in the world. The organization gathers educators, researchers, professionals and students from the sector.
*Translated by Sérgio Kakitani
