After months of training and wins at regional competitions, the University of Lethbridge's Inter-Collegiate Programming Contest team is participating in the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals in St. Petersburg, Russia for the first time.
Seeded sixth in a field of more than 100 competitors, the team's Canada Day long weekend won't be spent relaxing or camping in the great outdoors. They will instead be camped out in a university lecture hall 10 time zones away from home with hundreds of other students, looking to solve challenging computer coding problems.
The international event is hosted by St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (ITMO). Only 115 of the top teams worldwide make it to the world finals.
The events leading up to, and including, the St. Petersburg events are a gruelling series of problem-solving boot camps, competitions and drills designed to enhance the students' ability to work as a team under relentless pressure, the watchful eyes of the world's best judges and under extremely strict working conditions.
The team is on the road from June 27 to July 5. The competition takes place from June 30 to July 4. Team profiles and results will be posted on the ICPC website: http://icpc.baylor.edu/
In addition to sending a team to Russia, mathematics and computer science professor Dr. Howard Cheng is developing the next group of programming challenge participants.
In conjunction with the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals, an online programming challenge took place this past week among 14 teams or individuals.
Third-year U of L undergrad student Camara Lerner staged a remarkable comeback to take second place overall in the open category, following the St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics – the host venue for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals.
Lerner defeated Finland's Aalto University and the University of British Columbia "Purple Puppy' team. Lerner's third-year colleague Kai Fender made it through three rounds, winning against the National Institute of Technology (Warangal, India) and Turkey's Yasar University before falling to the UBC Purple Puppy team.
Details can be found at this website: http://icpc.baylor.edu/Challenge/
