Russian Students Win Brainy Programming Contest
SAN ANTONIO
A team of three students from Russia proved their brainy prowess Wednesday, winning an academic competition in which they had just five hours to solve perplexing computing puzzles such as how to connect gears of a clock when given a specific shaft speed.
“I am pleased with our performance today. It feels pretty good,” Igor Kulkin, 21, said after his team from Saratov State University won the 2006 Association for Computing Machinery’s International Collegiate Programming Contest.
Working in teams of three, contestants in the 30th annual event had five hours to solve 10 problems that would ordinarily take months to complete. Saratov led the pack by solving six of them in the allotted time.
The questions were dizzyingly complex. Among the puzzlers, greatly simplified here:
— Write a program that computes how the gears of a clock can be connected with an hour and a minute hand, based on a provided input shaft speed with a maximum of three gears per shaft.
