Gold, Silver, and Bronze: All Six Teams of the HSE Faculty of Computer Science Earn Medals at ICPC Semi-Final
On December 13–15, 2024, the final round of the Northern Eurasia Contests (the semi-final of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC)) took place. Six teams from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science (FCS) participated, and each of them won an award. The overall winner was the FCS team Surstrumien Bobra.
The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is the most prestigious global student competition in programming. During this five-hour event, teams of three students compete to solve as many algorithmic problems as possible.
The winning team consists of students from the Bachelor’s programme in Applied Mathematics and Information Science: second-year student Anton Stepanov and third-year students Alexey Mikhnenko and Vladimir Novikov.
Anton Stepanov
‘I enjoy student programming contests because they involve teams, not individual participants. It is always a lot of fun. Plus, in a team, you can always ask for help to solve a problem, write, or debug code. During the semi-final, I came up with a solution for problem K but was not ready to write it quickly—at that moment, we had not solved problem I yet, which was much easier. So, I explained the solution for problem K to my teammate Alexey, and while he was writing the code, Vladimir and I came up with the solution for problem I, and we successfully submitted both. We had not used this approach before, but as it turned out, this teamwork secured our victory.’
Alexey Mikhnenko
‘Midway through the contest, we got stuck on one problem that we needed to submit, and the time we spent on it was not enough in the end. It is clear that we still need a lot of practice, and that is what we shall do before the finals. I also want to note that I really liked the contest and the venue. I would love to get together like this more often.’
Vladimir Novikov
‘Parallel to the competition, a mirror contest was held on the Codeforces platform. After the round, it was interesting to check the results of friends who, for various reasons, did not officially participate in the semi-final. For instance, the HSE University team Muffix Sassif ranked sixth in the mirror contest and could have earned gold, taking third place in the semi-final if they had participated officially. We spent half of the last day of the competition trying to win a plush Christmas tree to gift them for their excellent performance.’
This year, six teams of students from the Applied Mathematics and Information Science programme at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science made it to the ICPC semi-final, and all of them earned medals.
Gold medals were awarded to the M.O.S.C.O.W. team (Kirill Kudryashov, Alexander Babin, Yuri Fedorov), which took third place, and the ran'she ya byl schastliv/// team (Yuri Pustovalov, Alexander Nekrasov, Alexey Vasiliev), which placed fourth.
Silver medals went to the Outsiders team (Fedor Romashov, Vladislava Sinitsyna, Nikita Lazarev), which placed fifth, and The Lower Depths team (Valery Rodionov, Renat Karimov, Grigory Evgenyev), which took eighth place.
Bronze medals were awarded to the Solved Normal Form team (Ivan Piskarev, Vyacheslav Khrushchev, Gleb Ustimenko), which placed eleventh.
The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) consists of several stages: qualifiers, quarterfinals, semi-finals, and finals. In this season’s qualifier stage, HSE University set a record with 148 teams participating, 26 of which advanced to the quarterfinals held on November 17, 2024, at the VK office. The FCS teams performed exceptionally well in the quarterfinals, taking first, second, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh places. Eight FCS teams ranked in the top 10.
Text by Alexandra Sytnik
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