I suspect that's a math-heavy competition? This goes back to the times of Dijkstra, who - when visiting Russia - wrote quite unflatteringly about most stuff Soviet but the one thing he praised was that his Russian lecture attendees were uncommonly well-grounded in math and the theory of computation.

A friend of mine wrote a 'memoir' of his start in mathematics research as a schoolboy in St Petersburg: http://windowsontheory.org/2013/04/12/research-life-stories-...

Incidentally, he was on the team finishing in 2nd place in 1998 ACM finals.