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There won’t be any office pools predicting the outcome of this contest. Las Vegas won’t handicap it. And it will likely be ignored by the major networks.

But several hundred of the world’s smartest young people will gather next month in Stockholm, Sweden, to do battle in the Association for Computer Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest. At stake are prizes, bragging rights and a career jump-start.

In the middle of it all will be a Washington University team hoping to recapture a bit of glory for their school and their country.

It’s been more than a decade since a team from the United States managed to capture first place in the 33-year-old event, in which programmers compete to solve a series of complicated problems. And it’s been considerably longer since Washington University pulled off back-to-back wins in 1979 and 1980. Once dominated by the United States and Canada, the IBM-sponsored contest is now the stomping ground of teams from schools in Russia, China and Poland.

Whether the St. Louis team has what it takes to make a difference remains to be seen.

"I think we stand a good chance to be the best North American team. I think we can beat MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)," said Bill Smart, an assistant professor of computer science at Washington University, and the team’s coach. "But there are teams out there practicing 24 hours a day."

He’s not talking about teams in this country. And certainly not his own Washington University team, made up of Aayush Munjal, Sean Fellows and Doug Li.

These guys couldn’t practice if they wanted to. At least not as a team. That’s because Munjal graduated in December and is already working as a developer for Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. It’s been at least two months since the trio last met face to face.

The teammates play down the significance of their inability to practice, saying they have spent plenty of time together in the past and work well as a team. Besides, practice can only take you so far, they say.

"It’s not about your coding skills so much as your ability to solve very complicated problems in your head," said Munjal, from India.

Still, the situation won’t improve odds that were long to begin with cash advances.

Consider this: The NCAA basketball tournament now under way started with 65 teams out of the 340 or so Division I schools eligible to play. The programming team from Washington University is one of 100 teams that will travel to the finals in Sweden after emerging from a pool of more than 7,100 teams that took part in regional competitions around the world. Also going to the competition is a team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

No, they don’t have to shoot layups or worry about zone defenses. Their challenges are much more complicated, with each team given five hours to design and write computer programs that will solve 10 problems. For example, students might be asked to develop a program that could determine the most optimal way for a helicopter to travel between hospitals in a large city.

No team has ever gotten all 10 questions right, and it’s not unusual for a team to not get a single answer correct, said Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for IBM’s Lotus division.

For the winner, the rewards are significant.

Aside from scholarships and free computer gear, the winners are pretty much guaranteed to capture the attention of recruiters from top tech firms. Some even suggest a championship looks better on the resume than a university degree.

"I don’t know if I’d trade it for a Ph.D. with tenure, but it’s got some bragging rights," said Fellows, of Des Moines, Iowa. "If you are on the team that wins the world finals, you’ll definitely get a job wherever you want."

And it could be that very fact that helps explain why teams from the United States and Canada have lost their edge of this contest.

Simply put, students on teams from some of the other countries don’t have the same opportunities as students studying in places like the United States, where companies like IBM, Microsoft and Google are always recruiting at the college level. That makes some contestants hungrier than others, Heintzman said.

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