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

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

November 22, 2006

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.

    For more information, please contact:
 
    Jim McKeown
    TopCoder, Inc.
    Tel:   [phone]
    Email: [e-mail]

SOURCE  TopCoder, Inc.