The competition was divided into five categories out of which the one called Algorithm was the most prestigious one. 4114 IT specialist from all over the world opted for the category. Marek Cygan was the only Polish participant who qualified for semi finals.

The young student has already gathered a number of titles and prizes. In 2005 Cygan won the Google Code Jam competition after defeating 14,500 competitors from around the world.

In 2007 together with his three university fellow students he won a golden medal in an academic team programming championship organized in Tokyo. The team called "Warsaw Eagles" comprised also of Filip Wolski and Marcin Pilipczuk won with 88 other teams. Marek Cygan has also served internships in foreign IT companies. At the moment he plans to complete his PhD studies at the University of Warsaw and is not thinking about leaving Poland.

Thanks to Cygan's and other students' achievements the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics at the University of Warsaw comes first among numerous world universities classified in the TopCoder ranking.

The Las Vegas finals saw also another Pole achieve a success - Przemys³aw Dêbiak ranked 2^nd in the Marathon category of the contest.  Przemys³aw Dêbiak has already won in the TopCoder Open and Microsoft's Imagine Cup contests in previous years. (University of Warsaw, Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics)