Among the best in the world

From September 15 to September 20, the 48th ICPC World Finals took place in Astana, Kazakhstan. The KIT team consisting of Jonathan Dransfeld, Lucas Schwebler and Yidi Zang had already qualified for the World Finals with their gold medal at the Northwestern European Regional Contest 2023 (NWERC) almost a year ago. The team made good use of this time in between to train for the World Finals - with success! With seven solved tasks, KIT completed as many tasks as a bronze-ranked team and thus earned a Highest Honor. And with 18th place, KIT is ahead of renowned international competitors such as ETH Zurich, the University of Oxford and Harvard.

The ICPC World Finals are the last round of the ICPC and comprise 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, wide-ranging 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 to algorithmic geometry and mathematics.

The next ICPC World Finals are expected to take place in South America in 2025. In two months' time, we will see whether another KIT team qualifies for the NWERC.

For Bachelor students, the group led by T.-T. Prof. Thomas Bläsius offers an internship every summer semester that prepares them for the competition and from which future participants are selected. More information at https://icpc.iti.kit.edu or on the Discord server.