Over the years, as the Dean of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics I have witnessed the fantastic evolution of the International 24-hour Programming Contest. It developed from a local competition to a world-wide event, well-known and acknowledged. The event involves almost a thousand professional programmers and computer engineers every year. It has already reached 70 countries on 4 continents, and the popularity of the event grows year by year.

This book lets the reader become familiar with the results of 6 years, 5 contests and with the work of 200 people in creating the problem sets and solutions.

The appreciation and reputation of the 24-hour contest is mainly because of the carefully planned and prepared, high quality problem sets. The authors of the tasks, Dr. Dániel Marx and Balázs Benedek, used to be successful competitors themselves on other contests prior to founding this event. They use their experience and academic knowledge well to prepare problems that challenge even the best programmers in the world. The tasks over the past five years were originally prepared to be solved by teams of three within 24 hours, but under regular conditions, each set takes several hundred hours to create. Besides testing the programming skills and theoretical knowledge of the programmers, problem solving skills and creativeness are equally essential. The abilities are tested in a special way, thus these problem sets may be effective tools in the hands of professors and professionals to who wish to measure and rank the abilities of their students, colleagues or employees.

This collection of problems is unique. It could be useful both for university related education and for acquiring extra-curricular knowledge and practice. Moreover, solving these problems is fun, because they are implemented in a more realistic way, enriched with amusing elements. As the general topic is different each year, interested people may learn and widen their knowledge in several fields of science related to information technology.

The majority of the problems are closely connected to the core disciplines of computer science. Knowledge of algorithms, data structures, artificial intelligence paradigms, software engineering practices, and network protocols are essential for successfully solving the tasks. Therefore, this collection may be readily used in a wide variety of academic settings. Professors may use it for their own purposes in education and get inspiration for new ideas. The book comprises all the necessary instructions, background information and designer's environment for solving the problems developed for the past competitions.

I highly recommend this book to all my colleagues, partners and professionals as it should prove equally useful for educational and research purposes, for both individuals and teams.