Google Sergio Sancho, a computer science student at the University of Buenos Aires won the Google Code Jam, Google's annual computer programming competition, which comes with a $10,000 first prize. Sancho competed against a total of 7,500 top programmers from around the world for first place. A second place prize of $7,000 went to Po-Ru Loh, a mathematics student at Caltech. Third prize of $5,000 was awarded to Reid Barton, a math major at MIT, and fourth place and $3,000 went to Tomasz Czajka, who is studying for a doctorate in computer science at Purdue University. Additional cash prizes went to the other top 50 finalists, who are working or studying in the United States and in 16 other countries, from Scandinavia to central Europe to Hong Kong, Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Google flew all finalists to its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters this week to compete in the championship round. In 2003, Jimmy Mardell of Stockholm, Sweden, took home the grand prize.

This is the second year of the Google Code Jam, which is produced in conjunction with TopCoder, the leader in online programming competition, skills assessment and competitive software development. The Google Code Jam is a celebration of the art of computer science, and signals to programmers everywhere the value Google places on excellent coding.

The competition, which began began Sept. 1, attracted 7,500 participants from more than 100 countries. All entrants participated in an initial qualification round, and 500 of those went on to a two-round competition field. The top 50 scorers from round two of this phase came to Google for the finals. All of the programming for any round could be done in Java, C++, C# or VB.NET.

Read also Alan Eustace's (Google's Director of Engineering) post in

PR Weaver's comment: we couldn't find information about the precise content of the applications built by the finalists...