March 6-8, 2012 the 4th Open Scholastic Programming Contest was held in Moscow. “Belarusians have taken 7 1st place certificates, 3 2nd and 3rd ones”, said Alexei Borunov, programming coach from Mozyr.

The contest was conducted by Moscow Center for Continuous Mathematical Education, Moscow Institute of Open Education and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and financed by Educational Board of Moscow. It had two stages: initially every volunteer could take part using the Internet and then come to Moscow.

The first stage started on October 10, 2011, continued up to January 15, 2012 and obtained 1619 contestants from Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. They were suggested 16 tasks. Only 406 of those having the best results came to Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

The second stage of the contest took two days during which the contestants had 5 hours to write codes for 4 tasks, each being estimated by test data input groups. The contestant whose programs had correctly processed more input data groups becomes the winner.

The contest offered 34 1st place certificates, 29 for the 2nd place and 50 for the 3rd.