Programming is a discipline in which Poles have always excelled - which is why some of the world's best known technology companies, including IBM, Motorola and Google, have decided to set up research centres in Poland.
Listed below are some of the successes achieved by Polish programmers in recent international competitions.
Jakub Nalepa, a Polish software engineer at Future Processing, achieved the best result in the prestigious international competition for algorithmicists organised by the renowned Norwegian SINTEF project in 2011. Nalepa improved the previous record for a single instance of benchmarking problems by 30% - a considerable margin in this discipline.
Nalepa's solution, which involves parallel memetic and heuristic algorithms, improves upon the best known result in the world for benchmarking problem instances found by Gehring and Homberger. His solution has been published on the SINTEF website, along with other world-leading results. Nalepa's completed his master's dissertation, which examined the algorithm, at the Silesian University of Technology in Southern Poland.
The Microsoft Imagine Cup saw Poland win again in 2011. Team Celladoor from the Adam's Mickiewicz University won first place in the Web Game Design competition. In the Individual IT Challenge competition, Blazej Matuszyk from the Poznan University of Technology came second while another team from the Adam's Mickiewicz University attained third place in the interoperability competition.
The Microsoft Imagine Cup is the world's largest student technology competition. Founded in 2002, it focuses on finding solutions to real-world problems. Since 2003, over 1.4 million students have participated in the Imagine Cup with 358,000 students representing 183 countries and regions entering 2011 competition.
Poland came third in the 2011 TopCoder country ranking for programmers, having previously held the top spot. Top Coder has also placed the University of Warsaw as third in its global ranking of universities. The University has won its competition twice previously. A further two Polish Universities made the top thirty institutions. Of the top 100 individual coders, 15 are Polish.
Founded in 2001, TopCoder competitions are organised and run by TopCoder Inc, which allocates more than $2 million in awards to winners. TopCoder competitions take the form of short, weekly contests and larger tournaments, which are held at least once a year.
A team from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków beat thousands of students representing the world's best technical universities, winning bronze at the 35th Academic International Collegiate Programming Contest in Orlando.
The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, dubbed the Olympics of computer programming, attracts the best computing students from around the world.
In 2010 a team from The University of Warsaw beat over 97 teams to win bronze. In 2009 the Warsaw team won bronze in the World Finals and was the overall winner of the Central Europe competition. A Polish team won the World competition in 2007.
Jakub Pachocki from Poland won third place in the Google Code Jam competition in 2011, beating 30,000 other contestants from around the world.
Google Code Jam is an international programming competition hosted and administered by Google. The competition, which has been running since 2003, consists of a set of algorithmic problems which must be solved in a fixed amount of time.
In 2011, a Polish computer programming student won the prestigious University of Cambridge ESOL's Online Game Competition for designing "Word Chase" - a Flash-based game aimed at children learning English.
A team from the Poznan University of Technology was triumphant in the 2011 Hack4Europe competition. It was the winner in the 'application with the greatest commercial' potential category. The competition is organised by Europeana to promote the use of its API, and is supported by the European Commission.
In December 2010, the same team was picked as a winner in the Samsung Global Developer Challenge. The challenge saw a total of 2,077 teams create mobile applications with only 34 winners selected
