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Russia’s nicka81 and Petr, China’s PE Triumph at TopCoder Collegiate Challenge in San Diego

TopCoder, Inc.
2006-11-22 10:44 1527

New York, Moscow and Zhejiang University Students Are TopCoder’s World

Champion Programmers

GLASTONBURY, Conn., Nov. 22 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- TopCoder, Inc., the

leader in online programming competition, skills assessment and competitive

software development today announced Nikolay Archak of New York University,

Petr Mitrichev of Moscow State University and Huang Ninghai of ZheJiang

University as champions in their respective tournaments for design,

algorithms and development at the 2006 TopCoder(R) Collegiate Challenge in

San Diego Friday night. Archak, known by his TopCoder handle "nicka81" took

$25,000 in prize money for his victory with Mitrichev (aka "Petr") and

Ninghai ("PE") earning $25,000 and $15,000 for their first place finishes.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20061121/NYTU095 )

An onsite finalist in both the algorithm and component tracks, nicka81

produced first place submissions for each of three design components from a

field of seven designers who competed over the course of three days. Petr is

a back-to-back algorithm champion having won the 2006 TopCoder Open first

prize in that category. This was the first onsite appearance for PE who

submitted two out of three winning development challenges.

In an interesting side note, programmers from China -- "maone" (Mao

Yiqiang), "ACRush" (TianCheng Lou) and "magicpig" (Ronghui Zhu), took second

place in each of the three competition tracks. Third places went to sql_lall

(Patrick Coleman of Australia), mathijs (Mathijs Vogelzang of the

Netherlands) and kiveol (Nathan Kuchta of the U.S.).

"We congratulate all our onsite finalists and hope they had a great time

here in San Diego," said Rob Hughes, President and COO of TopCoder, Inc. "The

growth of our community this year has been truly amazing and we will continue

to look for better ways to challenge and empower programmers around the

world."

This year marked the first time a TopCoder global event was presented on

the internet, Webcast live via AOL’s http://dev.aol.com site, bringing the

excitement and drama of competitive coding at the highest level to a global

audience. Thousands of the brightest students from computer science,

mathematics, physics and other fields representing 92 countries from around

the world spent months locked in qualifying heats. The final 63 were flown in

all expenses paid to San Diego to compete for a share of the $200,000 prize

purse.

About TopCoder, Inc.

TopCoder is the recognized leader in identifying, evaluating and

mobilizing effective software development resources. Through its proprietary

programming competitions and rating system, TopCoder recognizes and promotes

the abilities of the best programmers around the world. TopCoder Software

harnesses the talent of these developers to design, develop and deploy

software through its revolutionary competitive development methodology.

TopCoder’s methodology emphasizes thorough specification and design,

distributed development using reusable components, and a rigorous quality

assurance review process and results in higher quality, lower cost software

solutions than traditional software development methodologies. For more

information about sponsoring TopCoder Events, recruiting TopCoder members and

utilizing TopCoder Software, visit http://www.topcoder.com/ .

TopCoder is a registered trademark of TopCoder, Inc. in the United States

and other countries. All other product and company names herein may be

trademarks of their respective owners.

Source: TopCoder, Inc.
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