A third of the prizes are ours

These are the results of the World Programming Championship

Simultaneously with the Hannover CeBIT exhibition, another very important IT event took place in Tokyo - the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), the final of the world programming championship among student teams. The event is held under the auspices of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and with the support of IBM.

Before getting to the Tokyo finals, the teams went through multi-stage selection at regional competitions. Russia was represented by ten universities from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Saratov, Novosibirsk, Petrozavodsk, Vologda, Stavropol, Yekaterinburg and Orel. This alone should be considered, if not a success, then, in any case, an indicator of class. From China, where many more students are involved in sports programming than in Russia, eleven teams came to the finals (counting Hong Kong). The United States, which surpasses other countries in the number of universities reaching the ICPC finals, fielded 20 teams.

According to ICPC rules, teams consisting of three people are offered from eight to twelve non-trivial programming tasks that are very difficult to algorithmize (problems, in the terminology of the organizers). They are given five hours to solve them. When determining the winner, the number of correctly solved tasks, the time spent, and the number of unsuccessful attempts to pass the solved task are taken into account. This year's tasks were no different in complexity from previous finals, but the coaches of our teams complained about the poor, sometimes even ambiguous text of the tournament tasks. But this did not violate the sports principle in any way - all teams had the same texts.

The highest reputation, according to ICPC participants, is enjoyed by the Chinese, Russians, Americans and, despite the small number (only two teams from Warsaw and Wroclaw), the Poles. The Indians, represented by four universities, are not yet among the favorites.

The struggle for championship was between the St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics (ITMO), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Beijing Tsinghua University, the University of Warsaw, Moscow State University, St. Petersburg State University and Novosibirsk University. The Poles, having completed eight out of ten tasks, took the ICPC Cup. The Chinese solved one less task - second place. The teams that took places from third to thirteenth solved six tasks each, and the places between them were distributed depending on auxiliary indicators. Thus, St. Petersburg ITMO was ahead of MIT because the Americans made one more unsuccessful attempt to pass the assignment.

The result of the final tournament was extremely successful for Russia - four out of twelve prizes. In addition to ITMO, medals were received by residents of Novosibirsk and Saratov (5th-6th places) and Moscow State University (10th place). Petrozavodsk University fell just short of bronze, where, by the way, regular training sessions for teams of programmer-athletes from Russia, the CIS, and, more recently, Poland are held.

The successes of the teams competing in the ICPC finals demonstrate the potential level of our IT development, which primarily depends on whether the country has qualified people capable of engineering creativity. Fortunately, Russia, despite the increasing competition from China, remains among the ICPC elite.

Andrey ANNENKOV, “Profile”, - specially for “Vremya Novostey”,