ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest

The ICPC, entitled the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, is an annual multi-tiered competitive programming competition among the universities of the world. The contest is sponsored by IBM. Headquartered at Baylor University, directed by ICPC Executive Director and Baylor Professor William B. Poucher, the ICPC operates in autonomous regions on six continents under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in accordance with the ICPC Policies and Procedures which are published at the Official ICPC Headquarters Website.

The ICPC traces its roots to a competition held at Texas A&M University in 1970 hosted by the Alpha Chapter of the Upsilon Pi Epsilon Computer Science Honor Society (UPE). This initial programming competition was titled First Annual Texas Collegiate Programming Championship and each University was represented by a team of up to 5 members. The computer used was a 360 model 65 which was one of the first machines with a DAT (Dynamic Address Translator aka "paging") system for accessing memory. The start of the competition was delayed for about 90 minutes because 2 of the 4 "memory bank" amplifiers were down. Teams that participated included, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, University of Houston, and 5 or 6 other Texas University / Colleges. There were 3 problems that had to be completed and the cumulative time from "start" to "successful completion" determined 1st, 2nd, and 3rd-place winners. The programming language used was Fortran. The programs were written on coding sheets, keypunched on Hollerith cards, and submitted for execution. The University of Houston team won the competition completing all three problems successfully with time. The second and third place teams did not successfully complete all 3 three problems. The contest evolved into its present form as a multi-tier competition in 1977, with the first finals held in conjunction with the ACM Computer Science Conference.

From 1977 to 1989, the contest included mainly teams of four from universities throughout the United States and Canada. Headquartered at Baylor University since 1989, with regionals established within the world's university community, operating under the auspices of ACM, and with substantial industry support, the ICPC has grown into a worldwide competition. To increase access to the World Finals, teams were reduced to 3 students within their first five academic years.

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