On the 19th of May, 2016, the 40th World Finals of Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC),hosted by Prince of Songkla University, ended successfully. SJTU representatives, composed of three students, Huang Wenhan, Ni Haobin and Liu Yanpei, from Zhiyuan School and the School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, won the second prize with seven points lower than the Champion (Saint Petersburg State University) due to the time penalty. Harvard University came in third and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology took fourth. All of the four universities won gold medals. In the meanwhile, SJTU won the Asian champion. The next contest will take place in Rapid City, South Dakota, USA in 2017.

For the past three decades, ACM-ICPC has been the world's most prestigious intellectual competition for young programmers. With a total of more than 300,000 students from 2,736 universities in 102 countries on 6 continents participating, 128 teams of university students stood out in the intercontinental preliminary contests. Many foreign world-class universities took part in the contest, including Harvard University, Stanford University, MIT, University of California Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University and 17 teams from Chinese universities including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), Fudan University, Zhejiang University, and Sun Yat-sen University, competing for "the most intelligent people in the world".