The first few days of the contest were dominated by higher level languages (iirc Python help the top spot for a little). The forums were filled with people talk

The first few days of the contest were dominated by higher level languages (iirc Python help the top spot for a little). The forums were filled with people talking about their approaches, and there was a ton of rapid prototyping. Once the algorithms were solidified, the people that knew C++ implemented them as optimized as possible. The bots had a limit of 1 second for processing per move. As soon as the ideal algorithms were understood, it was a no brainer to make it as fast as possible. It really just came down to raw speed in the end, which is hardly representative of most real world problems.