The history of ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest can be traced back to 1970, when the first competition was held at Texas A&M University. At that time, the organizer was the Alpha Chapter of the UPE Computer Science Honor Society. As a new way to discover and cultivate top students in computer science, the competition quickly received positive responses from universities in the United States and Canada. In 1977, the first finals were held during the ACM Conference on computer science, and became an annual international competition participated by many countries.
In the first few competitions, the teams mainly came from the United States and Canada, and then gradually developed into a worldwide competition. Especially since IBM started sponsoring events in 1997, the scale of events has grown rapidly. In 1997, 840 teams from 560 universities competed. By 2004, the number had rapidly increased to 4109 units in 840 universities and was growing at a rate of 10-20% per year.
In the 1980s, ACM headquartered the competition at Baylor University in Texas.
In the early days of the event, most of the Championships were won by universities in the United States and Canada. Since the late 1990s, universities in Russia and other Eastern European countries have won several titles in a row. The delegation of Shanghai Jiaotong University from mainland China won three championships in the 26th World Finals in Hawaii in 2002, 29th in Shanghai in 2005 and 34th in Harbin in 2010. The team of Zhejiang University won the global championship in the 35th ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, which ended at 2:00 p.m. local time on May 30, 2011, and became the winner of the competition. Apart from Shanghai Jiaotong University, it is the only Asian university that has won the World Finals of ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. This is also the best result of Asian universities in the competition so far. The competition pattern of the event has evolved from the original North American university to the current situation of Asia Europe confrontation.
In the 2015 World Finals, the National University of information technology, machinery and optics of St. Petersburg, with 13 topics, became the first team in ACM-ICPC history to win AK in the World Finals, and also the team with the highest number of titles (6 times) in ACM-ICPC World Finals in history. This performance was called the best of best by the compere on the spot. In April 2018, ACM-ICPC was held in Beijing, China. It was hosted by Peking University. At last, Peking University won the gold medal by completing topic G.
The only AK team appeared in the ?th ACM World Finals.