HSE Faculty of Computer Science Team Takes Bronze at ICPC
The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals took place on November 6–11 in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. The team from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science (FCS) took ninth place, winning bronze and achieving the best result among Russian universities.
The team of the HSE Moscow campus was coached by Mikhail Gustokashin, Director of the HSE Centre of Student Competitions, and included Maxim Gorokhovsky, Ivan Safonov and Ramazan Rakhmatullin. HSE University’s St Petersburg campus was also represented by a team consisting of Vasily Alferov, Konstantin Makhnev and Maria Fedorkina (coach Alisa Sayutina), which came 16th.
Over 50,000 students from 111 countries and 3,000 universities applied for the competition.
The finals featured 132 teams; each university could send only one team.
ICPC is one of the world’s biggest and most prestigious programming contests. Teams consisting of three participants each represent their universities and solve problems, demonstrating such skills as teamwork, creativity, innovativeness, and the ability to work under competitive pressure and tough deadlines. This year, the competition was hosted by the University of Asia Pacific.
Team coach Mikhail Gustokashin said that HSE University demonstrated its best result in the history of its participation in ICPC finals.
Mikhail Gustokashin
‘We have placed 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th in different years, winning bronze medals in the ICPC finals. This medal is our third in a row. Next year, the finals are taking place in Egypt, and HSE University will be represented by a team including two participants of this year’s finals, which means that their experience gives us great hope for high achievements next year.’
Each team had to solve 12 problems. During the last hour of the competition, the online table of results was frozen. Over this hour, the teams made 671 attempts to solve the problems. A total of 12 sets of medals were awarded in the competition across four ranks. The team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) was the overall winner.
On November 8, the HSE University team also participated in an optimisation problem solving competition as part of the ICPC finals and took first place among student teams.
In spring 2022, two FCS teams took first and second place in the Northern Eurasia Regional Contests (NERC) ICPC 2022, a selection competition for ICPC 2022. NERC ICPC is a semi-final stage of the ICPC.