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.
Polish student Przemyslaw Debiak repeated his country's 2006 victory in the Algorithm category of Microsoft's Imagine Cup by winning the 2007 competition. A total of 17 Polish students competed in seven of the nine categories at the international final, which took place in Korea in August 2007.
The Imagine Cup is the world's biggest technology competition for students. In this, its fifth year, it attracted around 150,000 entrants from more than 190 countries, including 1,545 from Poland . This year's motto was: Imagine a world where technology enables a better education for all . The total value of prizes reached USD170,000.
A Polish team triumphed over more than 6,000 others at the IBM-sponsored 31st ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. Participants in the world final, which took place at the Hilton Tokyo Bay Hotel in March 2007, faced up to eight highly complex computer programming problems modelled on real-world business challenges. The team of four programmers from Warsaw University solved the most tasks in the allotted five hours. A total of 6,099 teams, representing 1,756 universities from 82 countries on six continents, took part.
A group of students from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow was second in the 2006 International Collegiate Programming Contest. Although defeated by a team from Russia's Saratov University, the Poles beat 5,600 other student teams from 1,700 universities around the world. The final took place in San Antonio, USA. It was the 30th edition of this IBM-sponsored contest.
Poland topped the 2005 TopCoder country ranking for programmers. In the same year, a student at Warsaw University completed a hat-trick of TopCoder wins against competitors from around the globe, while three Polish entries were among the world's best 25 best university teams.
TopCoder programmer rankings are based on individual and university achievements. Poles regularly lead both sections.
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.
In the 2007 TopCoder competition, a Polish programmer was second in the algorithm section, while a student from the Sixth Grammar School in Bydgoszcz reached eighth place in the newly-introduced High School event. Another Polish youngster, of the Ninth Grammar School in Wroclaw, was 13th in the same contest.
