This is the VOA Special EnglishEducation Report.Last month, studentsfrom one hundred three universitiesin eighty-eight countriestook part in an internationalcomputer programming contest.The Battle of the Brainstook place in Harbin, China.Three-person teams from each schoolhad five hours to solveeleven real world problems.Jerry Cain coached the teamfrom Stanford Universityin Palo Alto, California.He says the problems involved,among other things, paperweights,robots, castles and lakes.JERRY CAIN: "One of the programmingproblems was try to figure outhow to break an arbitrarychocolate bar intoa certain number of piecesof a certain number of sizesand to do it as quickly as possible.And that's probablythe simplest of all of them."The students firstlisted the problemsin order of difficulty.Then they figured outthe requirements of each.They designed waysto test their solutions.And they wrote the neededsoftware systems.Even the winning teamfrom Shanghai Jiaotong Universityin China was not ableto solve all the problemswithin the given time limit.Stanford's team solved five problemsand finished in fourteenth place.Stanford was one of twenty-oneAmerican universitiesthat took part in the contest this year.The official name ofthe Battle of the Brainsis the ACM InternationalCollegiate Programming Contest.It began in nineteen seventyat Texas A and M University.The contest quickly became popularin the United States and Canada.It developed and grew as moreand more schools took partin local and area contests.The first final competitionwas held in nineteen seventy-sevenat the Association for ComputerMachinery Computer Science Conference.Today, a network of universitiesholds area competitionsthat send the winnersto the world finals,now organized by IBM.Contest spokesman Doug Heintzman saysthe world championsreceive prizes and scholarships.They are also guaranteed anoffer of employmentor internship with IBM.DOUG HEINTZMAN: "We've had pastworld champions that IBM has goneand employed in our Zurichresearch laboratory and are nowworking on some of the leadingedge materials in science and physics.We have a world finalistfrom China who's been workingon the Watson Supercomputerthat in the near futurewill be playing Jeopardyagainst the best Jeopardyplayers in the world.So this competitionis an opportunity to berecognized and to be recruitedby some of the top technologyand research firms around the world."And that's the VOA Special EnglishEducation Report,written by Nancy Steinbach,with reporting by Faiza Elmasry.You can read all our reportsand send commentsto our newly re-designedWeb site at 51voa.com.