Seven Belarusian Teams In Semifinals Of The International Collegiate Programming Contest

29 October 2010

Six BSU (Belarusian State University) teams and one of BSUIR (Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radio electronics) got into the semifinals of the quarterfinal Collegiate Programming Contest among students of the Western region. According to Pavel Mandrick, the Dean of the Applied Mathematics and Informatics Faculty of BSU, this is our best result in 13 years of this contest's history.

This year in Minsk 57 student teams took part in the quarterfinals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) for the Western region. There were representatives from Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia. The participants were to solve as many tasks of 13 total as possible for the 5 hours of the contest. In the end of the day, twelve strongest teams were defined. Two BSU teams managed to correctly solve 10 and 9 out of the 13 tasks and gotten the 1st degree diplomas. Four more teams of the same University won 2nd and 3rd degree diplomas. Besides that among the best was one more team from Belarus (BSUIR), one from Russia (The Kaliningrad University named after I.Kant), one from Latvia (The University of Riga), one from Estonia (Tartu University) and two from Lithuania (Vilnius University and Kaunas Technological University).

The semifinals will take place in St.Pete on November the 24th. According to quota, there are 12 places for the teams of the Western region. Rules imply that there are 3 students in one team. They have to solve 10-12 tasks within 5 hours. The tasks are based on the knowledge of discrete mathematics algorithms and programming and are in English. The winner is the team that manages to solve more problems faster than the others.

This Programming contest is the biggest International competition of the young programming elite of the world. It's held annually starting from 1977 by Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) and consists of three stages: quarterfinals, semifinals and finals. Belarusian teams take part in this contest starting 1995. Three years later the Organizing committee of the ACM competitions has awarded BSU with a certificate of the Western region contest organizing university (1/4 finals, Belarus and the Baltics). From this time on the faculty of the Applied Mathematics and Informatics hosts this contest. Today the BSU team is in Top-20 of the world leading universities.