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==History==
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 five members. The computer used was a [[IBM System 360|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 two of the four "memory bank" amplifiers were down. Teams that participated included, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, University of Houston, and five or six other Texas University / Colleges. There were three problems that had to be completed and the cumulative time from "start" to "successful completion" determined first-, second-, and third-place winners. The programming language used was [[Fortran]]. The programs were written on coding sheets, keypunched on [[Hollerith card]]s, 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 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. ICPC Headquarters was hosted by [[Baylor University]] from 1989 until 2022, with regional contests established within the world's university community, the ICPC has grown into a worldwide competition. To increase access to the World Finals, teams were reduced to three students within their first five academic years.{{cn|date=March 2022}}
From 1997 to 2017, [[IBM|International Business Machines Corporation]] (IBM) was the sponsor of ICPC. During that time contest participation has grown by more than 2000%. In 1997, 840 teams from 560 universities participated. In 2017, 46,381 students from 2,948 universities in 103 countries on six continents participated in regional competitions. Organized as a highly localized extra-curricular university mind sport and operating as a globally-coordinated unincorporated association operating under agreements with host universities and non-profits, the ICPC is open to qualified teams from every university in the world.{{citation needed|date=November 2020}}
UPE has provided continuous support since 1970 and honored World Finalists since the first Finals in 1976. The ICPC is indebted to ACM member contributions and ACM assistance from 1976 to 2018. Baylor University served since 1985, hosting ICPC Headquarters from 1989 until 2022. The ICPC operates under the auspices of the ICPC Foundation which provides the ICPC Global Headquarters to service a globally-coordinated community whose events operate under agreements with host universities and non-profits to insure that participation in ICPC is open to qualified teams from every university in the world. See ICPC Policies and Procedures.<ref name="icpcpp"/>
The ICPC World Finals (The Annual World Finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest) is the final round of competition. Over its history it has become a 4-day event held in the finest venues worldwide with 140 teams competing in the 2018 World Finals. Recent World Champion teams have been recognized by their country's head of state. In recent years, media impressions have hovered at the one billion mark.{{cn|date=November 2020}}
Since 2000, only teams from [[Russia]], [[China]], and [[Poland]] have won the ICPC world finals, except in 2022.<ref>{{Cite web |title=ICPC |url=https://icpc.global/static/media/mainLogoMobile.12b91576.png |access-date=2023-02-18 |website=icpc.global |language=en}}</ref> Participation in [[North America]] is much smaller than in the rest of the world, which is partially attributed to the perceived low payoff of participating.<ref name="sigcse16">{{cite journal |url=https://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~borja/pubs/sigcse2016-programming-contests.pdf |title=A Programming Contest Strategy Guide |first1=Aaron |last1=Bloomfield |first2=Borja |last2=Sotomayor |journal=SIGCSE '16: Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education |access-date=2020-03-15 |archive-date=2020-03-20 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200320230414/https://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~borja/pubs/sigcse2016-programming-contests.pdf |url-status=live }}</ref>
==Contest rules==
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