Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading global IT services, consulting and business solutions organization, announced that the ninth season of TCS CodeVita has won a Guinness World Records™ title as the world’s largest computer programming competition with 136,054 participants from 34 countries.
The 2021 TCS CodeVita competition invited college students from around the world to pit their programming skills against each other to be ranked among the top student programmers globally. Their knowledge and coding skills were tested as they solved complex real-world problems over an intense six-hour period. The winners walked away with cash prizes, and internship offers to work directly with technology leaders at TCS. This year’s champion, Ben Alexander Mirtchouk of Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey, is the competition’s first ever US winner.
“We are delighted to be awarding TCS this Guinness World Records title for the largest computer programming competition and would like to congratulate every single one of the 136,054 people that took part to smash the record,” said Neil Foster, VP EMEA APAC, Guinness World Records Limited. “They should be justly proud of the achievement and we are especially gratified in seeing innovative record solutions that bring people together digitally and to challenge themselves in a competition of this nature.”
“Long before words like hackathon became common, TCS saw the potential of programming as a sport and that inspired TCS CodeVita,” said Ananth Krishnan, CTO, TCS. “In a world where technology, innovation and creativity are playing a pivotal role, this competition is fueling a passion for programming in brilliant young people with diverse educational, social, geographical, and cultural backgrounds.”
“I’ve always been passionate about computer science and coding competitions. I gave it a shot without any specific intention of winning,” said Ben Alexander Mirtchouk, winner and student at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA.“Doing a lot of practice questions from CodeVita’s practice platform was really helpful. I could see the real-world applicability of the problems I was solving. It was a really cool experience all around.”
The 1st Runner Up was Václav Volhejn, a student at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. He was followed by 2nd Runner Up Ali Khosravi from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
The top three CodeVita finishers received cash prizes of $10,000, $7,000 and $3,000, respectively. They were also offered the opportunity to intern directly with one of the company’s technology leaders.
Launched in 2012 to spread awareness about the various applications of coding and help spot promising talent, CodeVita helps instill the ‘programming as a sport’ culture worldwide. Since then, hundreds of students have completed internships at TCS via CodeVita. In addition, from Season 3 onwards, CodeVita has led to more than 11,000 TCS job offers, underscoring an emerging recruitment trend – the gamification of hiring.
