Following tradition

Participation in the "International Collegiate Programming Contest" (ICPC) has become something of a tradition at the KIT Faculty of Computer Science and is now also reflected in various courses. It is also almost a tradition that KIT teams successfully participate in the competition and can be found in one of the top ranks. Three teams of three students each took part in this year's preliminary round of the North-West Europe Region (NWERC), which was held in Delft as in the previous year, and achieved excellent placings.

The Kindergarten Timelimit team (Jonathan Dransfeld, Lucas Schwebler, Yidi Zang) secured third place with 9 solved problems and was rewarded with a well-deserved gold medal. The team has thus qualified for the European final in the Czech Republic and the world final in Kazakhstan. A remarkable achievement thanks to their skills and intensive training over the previous year.
Team Infinite Loopers (Jonas Dalchow, Lennart Blumenthal, Sebastian Kirmayer) finished in 9th place with 8 solved problems, narrowly missing out on a silver medal. Nevertheless, they were delighted to win a bronze medal. The third team, cracK IT (Florian Brendle, Linus Schöb, Vladimir Sviridenkov), which was taking part in this competition for the first time, solved 5 problems and achieved a respectable 69th place. Placing in the top half on their first appearance is a promising start and shows the potential of this team for future competitions.

The three KIT teams (from left to right): Crack IT, Kindergarten Timelimit and Infinite Loopers

The teams were accompanied by their coaches Chris Weyand, Michael Zündorf and Miriam Goetze, who supported them and took care of organizational tasks. Michael also took on the role of a jury member and had invested the last few months in the preparation and design of the problems.

The problems with solutions can be found together with the final results here.

If you also want to take part in the NWERC, come to our Discord server. There you will always find all the latest information about ICPC courses, our competitions and the internal qualification.

The NWERC is the first round of the ICPC and comprises a time frame of five hours, in which three students each deal with twelve algorithmic problems. It is important to derive a solution quickly and then implement it as precisely as possible. The tasks come from subject areas such as graph theory, numerics, geometry, number theory and dynamic programming. Coordinated group work, extensive knowledge, efficient and error-free work and the recognition of edge cases are particularly important in this competition.

The ICPC is considered one of the most important student programming competitions and is organized every year by the world's largest computer science association, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). After the various regional competitions, there is also a global final. The tasks at the ICPC range from tricky implementation tasks to tasks on the design and implementation of algorithms and data structures through to algorithmic geometry and mathematics.