NSU and MIT: 19 Place Shared at ACM-ICPC

The 2014 World Finals of the 38th Contest were held in Ekaterinburg, Russia on June 21-25. The annual contest is sponsored by IBM and operates under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

For a number of decades ACM-ICPC or just ICPC mean the most prestigious team competition for young programmers. Russia has held the Finals for the second time in their history. The 2013 World Finals were held in Saint Petersburg and the 2014 - in Ekaterinburg.

There were 122 teams participating in the competition, which went through semi-finals out of the initial 33,430 participants representing 2,385 universities from 89 countries and 400 cities on 6 continents. Russian universities were represented by 11 teams.

Current rules stipulate that each team consist of three students. Each team can use only one computer and is to solve a set of between 8 and 12 programming problems (with 8 typical for regionals and 10 for finals) during 5 hours. They must submit solutions as programs in C, C++ or Java. Programs are then run by the jury on test data. The winner is the team which correctly solves most problems. If necessary to rank teams for medals or prizes among tying teams, the placement of teams is determined by the time.

“ACM ICPC is a wonderful opportunity for students from all over the world to get together and exchange valuable experience,” says Dr. Bill Poucher, professor of Baylor University and executive director of ACM ICPC. “I’m happy to see the young people using their knowledge that they got during the competition for their further development in science and career as members of ACM.”

Russian teams have traditionally received high prizes including the Cup (with St. Petersburg State University becoming the world champion) and two sets of gold and bronze medals. MSU took the second place and won gold medals; St. Petersburg National Research University of IT, Mechanics and Optics and National Research University Higher School of Economics received bronze medals.

It is notable that NSU and MIT constantly appear quite close in the ranking table. This year the teams solved three problems each and the 19 place was shared by a few teams with MIT taking the 24th line, NSU – the 29th and the National University of Singapore the 33rd. Two problems were solved, for example, by teams from the University of Cambridge — the 54th line and Stanford University — the 57th (they shared the 45th place). Teams from some other well-known universities such as Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California at Berkeley solved only one problem and shared the 80th place occupying the 97th and 102nd lines respectively.

NSU teams have been participating in the contest for 14 years, since the year 2000. During 11 years they participated in the Finals and steadily occupied places in the range of Top10-Top40 best teams in the world. Stepan Gatilov, who was the silver champion of the ACM-ICPC in 2007, in Tokyo, became the coach of the NSU team in 2013 and has taken up the baton after his trainers.

Our congratulations to the NSU1 team: Alexander Stenenko (DIT), Georgy Beloshapko (MMD), Vadim Zaytsev (DIT) and their coachers, Stepan Yu. Gatilov, Tatyana G. Churina, Tatyana V. Nesterenko and Elena N. Bozhenkova. Participating in the Finals 2014 is their yet another praiseworthy performance.