who are the most advaned cleverest type of programmers?-

[tali122]

who are the most advaned cleverest type of programmers?- is it gaming programmers or secruity or general software programmers or someother genre?

[tomd]

Virus programmers have to be ahead of the game, otherwise there'd no point.

[Space]

... which doesn't make them clever at all, it just makes them competent at their "job"...
Most viruses are simply vandalism, which makes me wonder about the intelligence of their creators...

[OBonio]

Gaming programmers.

The amount of maths involved is staggering. Physics (collision detection and the like) and geometry (3D is taken for granted nowadays... ) are key. Also, coding has to be of the upmost standard to milk as much speed out of the processor as possible. There's also AI for the computer controlled baddies. This is getting more and more advanced.

Virus writers usually borrow work from known exploits and add their own payload. Not very clever. I dare say I could write one given a few weeks. But I won't!

General programmers... I fall into this category. I'd say we were quite good, but we're not specialist. We can turn our hands to most problems. Jack of all trades, master of none sort of thing... I could do some things a games programmer couldn't, but I probably can't even do the simplest of AI... (maybe I will one day).

Security... like anti-virus and firewall stuff... quite clever, but they are just based on a set of rules... (if this is here and this registry key is set, then it's a virus, block this port for this set of IPs unless they are an authenticated user). The rules can get quite complicated, but that's all they are.

[Space]

OBonio, a single gaming programmer doesn't do all what you write about. They usually specialize. 
For example, programming the physics engine is a full-time job in itself, and most of the time, people who do it don't even work in the same company as people who program the game AI.
Middleware (external) libraries are frequently used.

However, in small companies, it is frequent that a single programmer is responsible for quite a wide variety of tasks,
such as AI, networking, game rules, visual effects,
integrating the external libraries ( which includes: learning to use them, detecting and reporting the bugs) ,
and has to fit it all in a relatively small amount of memory, constantly being careful about how much CPU time the code takes.
This explains why game programmers don't find much time to make their code very tidy...

[fo3nix]

its not what the programmer programs that makes them intelligent, it is the way in which they do it.

the most intelligent type of programmer is one who hacks.

(I am not meaning in the sense of hacking as you may be imagining)