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Last month, students from one hundred and three universities in eightyeight countries took part in an
international computer programming contest. The Battle of the Brains took place in Harbin, China.
__1__
Jerry Cain, coach of Stanford University Team California, says, "One of the programming problems was
trying to figure out how to break an arbitrary chocolate bar into a certain number of pieces of a certain
number of sizes and to do it as quickly as possible. __2__"
The students first listed the problems in order of difficulty.__3__ They designed ways to test their
solutions. And they wrote needed software systems. Even the winning team from Shanghai Jiaotong
University in China was not able to solve all the problems within the given time limit. Stanford's team
solved five problems and finished in the 14th place. Stanford was one of twentyone American universities
that took part in the contest this year.
__4__ It began in 1970 at Texas A&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 1977 at the Association for Computing 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. __5__
A. The competitors show real interest in IBM.
B. Then they figured out the requirements of each.
C. And that's probably the simplest of all of them.
D. This competition is an opportunity to be recognized by famous universities from the world.
E. Threeperson teams from each school had five hours to solve eleven real world problems.
F. The official name of the Battle of the Brains is the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.
G. They are also guaranteed an offer of employment with IBM.
