Going to Xtremes

Sinan Al-Sheikh describes how IEEEXtreme not only identifies the best programmers around the world, but it also creates a challenging environment for brilliant minds to challenge each other, innovate, and reach out to unique solutions for reallife problems. IEEEXtreme works hard to take its questions from real-life scenarios, which helps to map academic studies into real-life problems. The nature of the competition is quite tough; only great minds can stand the pressure and reach the top of the ranking list. The speed in solving the problem is no longer a factor in rankings. It doesn't matter how fast you solve the problem, what matters is the logic used in solving it and how many other teams could reach the same answer. All of the teams from around the world share their pictures and videos during the competition. You get to see other people with same interests going through the same experience. Almost all participants receive something to remember this event. The top three teams receive items equivalent to US$20,000.