A team of Russian computer programmers won 1st prize at the world finals of The Association of Computing Machinery’s International Computer Programming Contest (ICPC) in St. Petersburg this week.

      All the Russian participants were from the St. Petersburg National Research University of IT, Mechanics and Optics, which wins the prestigious contest for the second year in a row. The top scoring US team was Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, placing 11th.

      The Association of Computing Machinery’s ICPC, also known as “The Battle of the Brains,” began as a contest held at Texas A&M University in 1970, but in 1997 IBM became sponsor and participation has since expanded by more than 1100 percent.

      This year about 112 teams from 85 countries took part in the contest, including 13 teams from Russian universities. The final test consisted of 11 timed problems, while a team of three programmers had to use only one computer to solve them.