The Battle of the Brains
College teams from around the world took part in a computer programming competition.
10 March 2010
A student takes part in the computer competition in Harbin, China
This is the VOA Special English Education Report.
Last month, students from one hundred three universities in eighty-eight countries took part in an international computer programming contest. The Battle of the Brains 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.
JERRY CAIN: "One of the programming problems was try 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. And that's probably the simplest of all of them."
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. 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 fourteenth place. Stanford was one of twenty-one American universities that took part in the contest this year.
最新
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25