Polish university student Marek Cygan has won this year's Google Code Jam, the annual programming contest held last Friday at the California headquarters of the search firm.

Dutch student Erik-Jan Krijgsman finished second, followed by Petr Mitrichev from Moscow's State University.

Cygan beat 99 fellow programmers from 32 countries to the first price of $10,000. The contestants were selected from a group of 14,500 hopefuls from around the world who entered the contest through the internet.

The programmers had 75 minutes to create a solution for three problems, followed by a 10-minute final round. Contestants were allowed to use the Java, C++, C# or VB.NET programming languages.

During an interview at the event, Google declined to provide details about the tasks as the competition was still running.

Previous contests involved contestants creating an application to calculate the shortest route through a maze, and to devise an application that would determine the largest group of people that know each other in a social network.

Another provided the coder with the weight of several children and asked them to create an application that would spread them on a seesaw so that the device would balance.

The tasks are not picked randomly, but are linked to problems that Google itself is facing with its applications.

"Things like finding the fastest way out of a maze is not that different from computing directions in Google Maps," Jeff Huber, vice president of engineering at Google, told vnunet.com.

The competition helps the company identify programmers who are good at solving such problems and thereby acts as a recruiting tool. About a third of the 100 finalists also had a job interview scheduled.

Huber stressed, however, that winning the competition did not guarantee a job and that Google still followed its regular recruiting procedures. "This is a nice introduction, but not a shortcut," he said.

This year's competition marked the first time that a woman made it to the final round. Although Google declined to comment on Stefanie Leitzka's performance, Huber hoped that the German student's participation would encourage other women to start a career in computer sciences. 

"We have a long way to go to improving the diversity that we should have in the field and the industry," he acknowledged.

Huber could not provide a percentage of women software engineers in Google's workforce, but said that the company is "healthy" relative to the industry.