Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
In February, students from one hundred three
universities in eighty-eight countries took part
in an international computer programming contest. It
was called The Battle of the Brains.
The competition took place in Harbin, China.
Three-person teams from each school had five hours
to solve eleven real world problems.
Jerry Cain coached the team from Stanford University
in Palo Alto, California. He says the problems
involved, among other things, paperweights, robots,
castles
and lakes. The students first listed the problems in
order of difficulty. Then they figured
out the requirements of each.
They designed ways to test their solutions. And they
wrote the
needed software systems.
The winning team was from Shanghai Jiaotong
University in China.
But even that team was not able
to solve all the problems within
the given time limit.
Stanford's team solved five problems and finished in
fourteenth place. Stanford was one of twenty-one
American universities that took
part in the contest this year.
The official name of the Battle of the Brains is the
ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.
It began in nineteen seventy at Texas A and M
University.
The contest quickly became popular in the United
States and Canada.
It developed and grew as more
and more schools took part in
local and area contests.
The first final competition was held in nineteen
seventy-seven at the Association for Computer
Machinery Computer Science Conference.
Today, a network of universities holds area
competitions that send the winners to the world
finals,
now organized by IBM.
Contest spokesman Doug Heintzman says the world
champions receive prizes and scholarships.
They are also guaranteed an
offer of employment or internship with IBM. He said
past world champions are now working on some
of the leading edge materials in science and
physics. One world finalist from China has been
working on the Watson Supercomputer.
So this competition is a chance
to be recognized and to work for some of the top
technology and research companies around the world.
And that's the VOA Special
English Education Report.
You can read all our reports
and send comments to our
newly re-designed Web site at voaspecialenglish.com.
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personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
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including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
