Harvard University became world champion at the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest, often referred to as ACM-ICPC, sponsored by AT&T in Indianapolis (Indiana, USA) in 1993. The team was made up of three brilliant students: Derrick Bass, Tony Hsieh, Craig Silverstein. They beat 31 teams from all over the world, including Stanford University from the US (second place) and the California Institute of Technology (third place). Curiously, Tony Hsieh has accomplished a high level of industry success and is now Zappos CEO.
The team managed to solve the following problems: "Budget Travel", "Classifying Lots in a Subdivision", "Kissin' Cousins", "Golygons", "Puzzle", "Resource Allocation", "Scanner". However, one problem was not solved: "MIDI Preprocessing".
Nowadays, thanks to the ACM-ICPC Online Judge site created and maintained by the ACM-ICPC problem archivist Miguel A. Revilla, it is still possible to compete and solve any problem from the ACM-ICPC. Revilla is a professor of mathematics at the University of Valladolid (Spain) as well as an author of several ACM-ICPC problems and books. Furthermore, Baylor University, which hosts the official ACM-ICPC website, maintains both a renewed version of the ACM-ICPC Live Archive and its Twitter feed.
Baylor's ACM-ICPC Live Archive tells us that "MIDI Preprocessing", that is to say the problem that was not solved at the 1993 ACM-ICPC Indianapolis World Finals, has been solved by Giuseppe Macario from Italy with a highly efficient solution. His world record dates back to 2009, and is still unbeaten. Macario remains the first and only Italian citizen to set two world records by solving problems of the ACM-ICPC.
In both cases, code written using optimized ANSI C language turned out to be faster than its C++ counterparts. The C language was initially developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at AT&T Bell Labs. After forty years, this programming language is still greatly appreciated by professionals from all over the world and is widely used in industry.