Who Is Winning The Real Cyber War?

“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.