It was competition day for the computer programming wizards at the International Collegiate Programming Contest.

Bill Poucher, ICPC executive director says, "The world finals of the ACM international.... is the penultimate competition among the best programmers not he world in universities."

For just five hours 133 teams of three competed for the crown of the worlds best college aged computer programmer.

Poucher says, "The idea behind this is that you actually have a problem set 12 problems or more some of the problems are pretty easy for them to do...pretty hard for me to do I'm just a computer scientist some of the other problems are very very hard to do."

Over 70 countries around the globe competed and Rapid City was represented by a team from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

Matt Dyke, SDSMT team member says, "It's a big deal especially since it's hosted in Rapid city this year it's a huge honor to represent the city and the school like Matt said our goal was to get two problems done we got two problems done we were close on a couple more so we were tremendously excited with how it turned out. "

and the most difficult part of the competition itself....

SDSMT team, Matt Dyke, Alex Iverson and Matthew Shallencamp says, "The problems"

The world champion for 2017 was the Russian team from St. Petersburg University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics.

Ivan Belomogov, winning team member says, "Yeah I started in school and during the time I have more and more classes and I train more and more and now I get a great result."

Other countries typically start programming classes much sooner than the United States and the Mines team hopes to encourage kids to start young.

Alex Iverson SDSMT team member says, "Computer science is extraordinarily helpful for everything because, like I said earlier, it's the closest thing we've discovered to magic."

Poucher says"When you are a student of computing you don't know what you can't do so you just go out and do the impossible."

Many teams plan on continuing work for next years competitions and if they have graduated they will move on to exciting careers in the programming field.

Poucher says, "They are our CTOS, CEOs, our presidents in the making, founders in the making, and what they make are new companies, new opportunities, they create opportunity for others."