Students compete on an individual basis, with up to four students competing from each participating country (with around 81 countries in 2004). The students compete individually and try to maximize their score by solving a set of informatics problems during two competition days. The problems have been algorithmic programming problems to be solved on a personal computer. Cultural and recreational events are organized on the remaining days.

$10 is not enough to make up for its e-books being restricted to one vendor however.

• 2001 Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, Doubleday
• 1995 Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials: Book 1 Northern Lights, Scholastic
• 1972 Richard Adams, Watership Down, Rex Collings
• 1956 C S Lewis, The Last Battle, Bodley Head

At the time of FarmVille’s launch, Zynga had just run out of data center space, so the company had to use Amazon’s EC2. That circumstance-based decision was extremely lucky, Williams said; given the game’s huge growth, without Amazon FarmVille would have failed. Amazon allowed Williams to “acquire instances at will” using RightScale, which he called “absolutely key.” Zynga uses Apache PHP on the front end, memcached for active user play and MySQL on the back end. It uses memcached to store key value pairs to deal with active user play during sessions and then later writes it to disk.