Last year, the Imagine Cup 2006 Algorithm semifinalists eradicated the fictitious X-Virus through the development of some extremely creative protein-folding algorithms.

This year, we have a real problem to tackle.

Mankind stands at the brink of a truly momentous discovery: learning how the brain works.

Understanding how the brain works has huge implications for the field of education. By knowing how we learn, we can optimize the way we teach, and dramatically increase the efficacy of teaching methods and curriculums.

Tremendous progress has been made in brain research in the past few years. Scientists have learned that the network of neurons and synapses in the brain can be modeled as a scale-free, small-world network – much like the web’s network of links.

Using techniques like magnetic resonance imaging, scientists can find the connections between neurons and produce network maps.

We also have learned that evolution is a great optimizer. It seems to have placed neurons in the brain in such a way as to minimize “wiring costs”, that is, the total length of the connections between neurons.

But at least to date, mankind has not figured out a way to do as good a job optimizing neuron placement as evolution has done. Current algorithms use variants of brute-force techniques, which have running times which grow exponentially and so are only usable on networks of a few hundred neurons in size – clearly no match for a true brain and its 100,000,000,000+ neurons. Improved algorithms are needed for being able to study and map larger and larger sections of the brain.

And that’s where we come in. Our collective team, which represents 200 of the smartest and most creative students in the world, is going to tackle this problem in Round 2 of Imagine Cup. Our goal is to find a neuron placement algorithm which not only does a good job at minimizing wiring costs, but runs efficiently enough to be used on large networks.

Each of you will have the chance to develop your own candidate algorithm and optimize it over the next seven weeks. We will provide you with a development and test environment which will help you develop, test, debug, and benchmark your algorithms. Your entries will be scored based on how well they minimize wiring costs as well as how quickly they run. And the winners are likely to do more than just advance to the finals – they have a chance of fundamentally improving the tools available to brain researchers and accelerating our understanding of the brain.