Polish IT computer wizards shine

A team of programmers from Kraków's Jagiellonian University (UJ) took second place in the prestigious International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). The contest, which has been taking place annually since 1970, is organised by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and sponsored by IBM.

With 83 teams taking part in the final, the UJ team lost only to the Saratov University from Russia. Both teams solved six out of 10 problems, but the Russians had a better time. Another team from Poland representing Warsaw University (UW) came seventh in the final.

This is not the first time that computer wizards from Poland have earned high honors in international competitions. A team from UW won the ACM contest in 2003. In the current Top Coder ranking of best programming teams, UW is first, while UJ holds 11th position. As far as country rankings go, Polish computer wizzes outsmart the rest of the world, having held the number one spot since the beginning of 2005, while Warsaw University's Tomasz Czajka has almost monopolized the individual rankings in recent years.

The director of the Institute of Computer Science at UJ, professor Stanisław Migórski, credits the Polish teaching system for the Polish students' success on the international scene. "In the US students are given the information and the solution. In our system there is a bigger stress on the process of understanding the problem, getting into details," he said.

Surprisingly, IT companies do not rush with job offers to the students who do so well in such international competitions. "One of the members of the team got a job at Comarch," Migórski said.

"I know that the students from the UW team had offers from the US, but we haven't had any offers for our students yet," he added.