Victory of the Russian programming team. Russian students won the world programming championship

Sergey Tushin, Deputy Head of the Yekaterinburg Administration for the Organization of Significant All-Russian and International Events:

- Holding the World Programming Championship did not become stressful for Yekaterinburg, since the entire infrastructure was adapted to the arrival of such a number of guests. Holding such an event is an indicator of the university's prestige and recognition of the level of Ural science. And also the opportunity to fix the level of development of the IT sphere in our region and give it a new impetus to move forward.

Marouane Naggar (Marwan Naggar), member of team # 10, student of Cairo University (Cairo University), Egypt (participates for the first time):

- This is the first time I participate in such a large-scale and grandiose world programming competition, so it is fantastic to be a part of it. The fact that you see these incredible guys from all over the world in one place is in itself inspiring to fight. The organization of the event is wonderful. We were well greeted, helped to get settled, accompanied everywhere. It should be noted that our coach needs special attention, as he is a person with disabilities, and we are very glad that there were no problems with this. We have not yet had a chance to see Yekaterinburg properly because of the clear schedule, but at first glance it seemed very beautiful to me, I liked the local architecture.

Igor Levitin, Aide to the President of the Russian Federation:

- It is important for us to hold such an event in the city. I don’t know who won yet, but I’m sure that the best won in a fair fight and won.

In Russia, very great importance educational programs and the creation of universities. IT programs at our universities are the key to high-quality engineering education in the Russian Federation. Today engineering education is one of the most important tasks in educational system... No technical new breakthrough solutions are unthinkable without IT technologies.

Evgeny Kuyvashev, Governor of the Sverdlovsk Region:

- This event allows us to model our life a little ahead. And, in many ways, the participants in today's competition will determine our life after a while. Because IT technologies move our lives forward and have penetrated into the industry and in general into all the industries that surround us. IT technologies make the distance from idea to implementation very short and fast. Programmers! You will move our lives, our fast and changing world forward.

Bill Poucher, Championships Executive DirectorACM ICPC, Baylor University professor:

- The ACM ICPC Championship is a great opportunity for students from all over the world to come together and share valuable experiences. I am glad to see how young people use the knowledge gained during the competition to further move along the chosen academic and career path as members of the Association. computing technology(ACM). The World Programming Championship is being held in order to cultivate more and more advanced generations of programmers who will be able to solve technical tasks for more high level... The past ICPC winners from Russia are the developers of VKontakte, Yandex, Mail.ru and SKB Kontur. The 2014 championship became the largest in the history of the ICPC: 122 teams from all over the world, and they have already reached the top. They are the stars of the ICPC-2014 universe! It is for them the future, for them - the XXII century!

Viktor Koksharov, Rector of the Ural federal university:

- I hope that the stay of the championship participants in Yekaterinburg was unforgettable: for this we did a lot, almost incredible. We even changed the weather: last week there was a storm, downpour and thunderstorms, and today it is sunny, you smile, and everything is fine. This is where science has come! Everything is in order with her in the Ural Federal: information technology, computer science, mathematics - many students of our university specialize in this, as well as members of the teams that have gathered here today. I wish you all good luck, good health and unforgettable impressions from Yekaterinburg and these competitions!

Alan Azaguri, Head of IBM Software Group Technical Strategy, Member of the IBM Academy of Technology and Head of ACM ICPC Sponsorship Program:

“As one of the leading international technology companies, IBM understands the importance of helping and motivating students to become familiar with the latest technological advances. Each year, ACM ICPC brings together best students-programmers in the world and gives them the opportunity to solve problems from the real world... We believe that these students are the future leaders of our industry, and we want to contribute to their development and preparation for future work. We hope the winners will help us build a truly intelligent planet.

Alexander Kuprin, participant of the World Programming ChampionshipACM ICPC 2014, graduate School economics, Moscow:
- According to the rules of the World Programming Championship, you can only participate in competitions twice. This is my second time. The first was in 2011 in Orlando. Then the main task for us was - at least to get to the final. We believe this has already been an achievement. I spoke from the Oryol State technical university... The first time impressions are always different. There were interesting events, we were taken to Sea World, a large amusement park. In the evening after the competition we went to the Universal Film Studio. The working day had just ended there, and the workers stayed there especially for us to conduct an excursion. They showed the village of Hogsmeade from Harry Potter and other things related to the "Fantastic Four", "Spider-Man" and so on. And so far, too, is not bad. Here we painted graffiti, the master classes were interesting. The parallel program held by the organizers is interesting and unusual in its own way.

Dmitry Bugrov,Director of ACM ICPC 2014 in Yekaterinburg,First Vice-Rector of UrFU:

- Today the "Information technology" industry is at the forefront and is developing very rapidly. Why are IT people at the forefront of progress? Because after a certain number of years, it is they who will rule the world, perhaps invisibly through mobile applications, computer programs and many other things that make our life different from the life of our ancestors, and the life of our children will make it different from ours with you. The most important thing is that this industry is constantly in need of nourishment, it does not tolerate stagnation, it constantly needs new brains. This alone ensures its development. The world develops because minds develop.

Ekaterina Korkh, captain of the Arrriva KVN team, student of the Ural State Forestry University:

- Our team was invited to the KVN Cup of the Student Activities Program within the ACM ICPC 2014 by the graduates of UrFU - the KVN team "Voices". We decided this was a great summer event worth participating in. It's great that in the framework of the World Programming Championship there is such a bright event as KVN.

The preparation is going well, we really like the editors and organizers - Maxim Basavin and Ekaterina Vlasyuk. Good guys with constructive criticism, with positive emotions, with whom it is a pleasure to work. The main thing for us is that the audience appreciates our performance. Indeed, in our program there is a part with a focus on the Championship. Much is new to us, including the stage: huge and, as far as I understand, without any curtains. But KVN people are people who are ready to adapt to any conditions. We even performed outside in the rain somehow, so it's not scary.

In the era information technologies, computers, iPhones, robots and everything that is smarter than me - such an event is very relevant. To be inside all this, learn some secrets at master classes and just have a great time, especially for free - it's generally cool!

Tees Kinkhorst, member of the organizing committeeACM ICPC 2014:

- I help the judges in organizing, and this is already my third world championship. What surprised me in Yekaterinburg is the number of volunteers who are always ready to help. When we arrived at the airport at 5 am and three volunteers greeted us and asked, "Can we help?", It was really cool! I think volunteers are the biggest plus in organizing this year's championship.

Vlad Borovkov, member of the organizing committee of the Territories of Unique Entertainment:

- Our main motto is not to be boring. We wanted to show our guests that programming and cybernetics in general is interesting and spectacular. It's nice that they believed in us and entrusted us with holding the event for the whole city.

Olga Nikolenko, volunteerACM ICPC 2014, student of UrFU:

- The volunteers had a very warm, family atmosphere. If any problematic situation arose and help was needed, I was sure that other guys would provide it to me. Naturally, sometimes there were some incidents, but the work of the volunteers themselves was impeccable, most gave all the best to the fullest. After all, these people are enthusiasts, and when a person is interested in what he does, it always turns out great. In exchange, we received so many emotions that they will be enough for the whole summer! The volunteers were in hotels, at the airport, and there were "buddies" - escorts. But most of the time we spent with our teams. Such events are very useful for the city and university, but are especially important for people from different countries learned to find a common language.

The world's largest sports programming competition - the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) - may be held in Moscow in 2020. The other day the capital was visited by a delegation headed by the executive director of the championship, which chose the site for the final. Among possible options- city stadiums. For the last seven years, only Russian teams from various universities have become the absolute champions of the world software games.

Recently, the leadership of the ICPC headquarters located in Texas came to Moscow, where it is planned to hold the final part of the 2020 World Cup.

Moscow is the real home of the champions of the ICPC-2018 final and half of the gold medalists of this year, ”said William Poucher, head of the delegation, ICPC executive director, professor at Baylor University, to Izvestia. - The city is the most likely candidate to host the ICPC finals in 2020. For almost two decades, many students Russian universities reached the World Cup finals and continued their professional development as programmers and founders of highly regarded companies in the global IT industry.

Moreover, over the past seven years, only students from Russian universities - ITMO, St. Petersburg State University, Moscow State University - have become absolute champions. It used to happen that the victory in international programming competitions went to the Chinese, Americans or Australians. But that is a thing of the past.

Representatives of 140 universities from 51 countries competed in Beijing this year, and the first two places were taken by the teams of Moscow State University and MIPT.

We deserve this Olympiad, - says Alexey Maleev, Vice-Rector for International Programs and Technological Entrepreneurship, Moscow Workshops ICPC project manager. - Moscow hosts not only universities - champions of recent Olympiads, but also the headquarters of all leading computer companies in Russia.

According to Aleksey Maleev, the ICPC management considers the 75th pavilion of VDNKh, the Skolkovo technopark and two stadiums - VTB Arena (formerly Dynamo stadium) and CSKA Arena on Avtozavodskaya as possible venues for the 2020 World Cup.

Sports programming, along with gaming eSports, is gradually acquiring the format and status of real Olympic competitions - with clear sports rules, regulations, a million fans, broadcasts to the whole world, and serious budgets. Roughly the same thing happened at the beginning of the last century with motor sports: as the influence of the auto industry on the world economy and daily life, the demand for sports events such as rallies or Formulas was formed, supported by the progressive financial capabilities of the industry.

Today, computer technology goes the way of automobile technology: a programmer has ceased to be a rare professional, like a chauffeur a hundred years ago. Programming has become a mass profession and, more and more often, a hobby of many people all over the world. Therefore, the broadcasts of the ICPC software championship are already gathering about a million viewers from the screens.

The number of fans in the stands in last years reaches several thousand, since the programming competition today is a real sports spectacle: dozens of winning teams of regional qualifying competitions, each of three people, are located in a stadium or other large area at tables with computers provided by the organizers of the competition. For several hours, the participants are engaged in solving about a dozen programming problems, and their progress is continuously displayed on sports screens, where fans can follow them. Professional commentators provide live coverage of the competition. The best solutions are then analyzed and analyzed on the fan forums, like the chess games of grandmasters.

This is the most prestigious competition of programmers in the world, - Mikhail Ipatov, a member of the 2018 championship champion team, a fourth-year student of the Moscow State University's Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, told Izvestia. - We are preparing for it all year round to please the fans.

According to Mikhail Ipatov, the Moscow State University team conducts joint five-hour sports training under the guidance of a coach three times a week, and in addition, each of the team members trains independently every day.

Help "Izvestia"

The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) takes place in the form of a student team championship. Born in 1970 in University of Texas and has been held annually since 1977. Until 1989, teams from US and Canadian universities took part in the championship. But today the championship has turned into a worldwide software sports competition. In 2018, approximately 50,000 top students and 5,000 coaches from more than 3,000 universities in 111 countries took part in the ICPC and its qualifying rounds around the world.

05/25/2017, Thu, 10:39, Moscow time , Text: Valeria Shmyrova

ITMO students won first place at the world's oldest programming competition ACM ICPC 2017, solving problems faster than their competitors. This is the seventh victory of the university in the championship, which is a world record. Last year's winner, St. Petersburg State University took fourth place.

ITMO's victory

St. Petersburg National Team research university Information Technology, Mechanics and Optics (ITMO) won first place at the ACM ICPC 2017 International Programming Olympiad. In addition to the gold medal, Ivan Belonogov, Ilya Zban, Vladimir Smykalov and their coach Andrey Stankevich were awarded a prize of $ 12 thousand.

The final round of the Olympiad was held on May 24 in Rapid City, USA. ITMO representatives managed to correctly solve 10 problems out of 12, and to do it faster than their rivals. According to the winners, intuition helped them to cope with 10 problems in 4 hours, which allowed them to rely on partially proven facts in the solution process. The champions are students of the Department of Computer Technologies, their trainer has been educating the ACM ICPC finalists for the last 15 years.

Other prizes

Championship medals are awarded to the 12 best teams that participated in the final. This time the places from the second to the fourth were taken by the teams of the University of Warsaw, Seoul University and St. state university(St. Petersburg State University). Their participants also solved 10 problems out of 12, but lost in speed. These teams were also awarded gold medals.

ITMO became world programming champion for the seventh time

The silver medalists of the Olympiad included teams from Fudan University, Peking University, Xinhua University and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Bronze medals were awarded to the teams of the University of Tokyo, the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, Ural Federal University and the Korean Institute of Advanced Technologies.

Olympiad record holders

Russia has been participating in the ACM ICPC since 1995. During this time, Russian teams have become champions of the Olympiad 12 times. This is the seventh victory for ITMO. Last year, the first place was taken by St. Petersburg State University, which has a total of 4 victories in the Olympiad. ITMO won a silver medal in the same year. The university holds the record for the number of victories at the ACM ICPC, which was first held in 1977. The world's oldest programming championship is sponsored by IBM.

This year's Olympiad was attended by 46,381 students from 2,948 universities in 103 countries. 133 teams reached the final, including 13 Russian ones. Three of them represented Moscow universities, the same number of teams came from St. Petersburg, the rest of the participants were from Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Perm, Petrozavodsk, Saratov, Samara and Tomsk.

On May 24, Rapid City (USA) hosted the culmination of the 2017 ACM ICPC World Programming Championship. The ITMO University team became the absolute champions, solving 10 problems out of 12 faster and smarter than their rivals. Thus, the St. Petersburg university set a new record in the history of the contest: the teams of ITMO University became the ACM ICPC winners for the seventh time, which has never been possible for any university in the world. The championship cup was raised overhead by students of the Department of Computer Technologies Vladimir Smykalov, Ivan Belonogov and Ilya Zban. This year, 133 teams from all regions of the world are participating in the finals of the most prestigious competition among programmers, the competition has already been held 41 times.

Awarding the ITMO University team

The team of the university was able to correctly solve 10 problems out of 12, spending the least amount of time on it. It was the time to solve problems and a smaller number of unsuccessful attempts to pass them that provided the team with the seventh ACM ICPC Cup. Other "golden" teams, which made up the four leaders of the contest, also solved ten problems each. The team was literally on the heels of the world champions Warsaw University, former favorite of ACM ICPC-2017. In third place are programmers from Seoul national university... The team of St. Petersburg State University finished with the fourth result - the champion of the last year. ITMO University team consists of students Faculty of Information Technology and ProgrammingVladimir Smykalov(the first year of master's degree at the Department of CT), Ivan Belonogov(fourth year undergraduate program of CT department) and Ilya Zbanya(fourth year of the bachelor's degree at the CT department). The head coach of the team was Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Technologies, Candidate of Technical Sciences Andrey Stankevich, which has prepared more than one generation of sports programmers. In 2016, he received the prestigious ACM ICPC Senior Coach Award for reaching the final of the competition for 15 years.

“The competition went amazingly smoothly,- shares his impressions Ivan Belonogov. - In some problems, we intuitively relied on facts that we could not completely prove, and our instinct did not let us down. We managed to complete 10 problems in actually four hours, and this gave us a good margin of confidence. But only at the very end, when we passed the tenth problem, I thought: "Okay, apparently, we will be able to take the gold!"

Other Russian teams also became prize-winners: the MIPT team will leave with the ACM ICPC silver, and the Ural Federal University with "Bronze" of the contest... In total, this year Russia was represented by 13 teams - one more than last year, including three each from Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as from other cities: Saratov, Perm, Petrozavodsk, Novosibirsk, Samara, Tomsk and Yekaterinburg. Teams from the Russian Federation have been participating in the championship since 1993, and since 2000 they have won the competition 12 times, including this year.

The full table of results can be found here.

“All the teams included in the TOP-12 were named in the favorites more than once - there were no big surprises. Comparing with the previous year, Asian universities showed a powerful breakthrough: last year they won only two medals, and now - as many as seven. However, there are many strong teams in each region, and the competition is getting more intense. ", - comments the mentor of the ITMO University team Andrey Stankevich.

The last hour of the competition, the coach admitted, was no less exciting for him than for his players.

"After standings freezes, the guys do not have any ways to show the coach whether the task is completed, but this time, seeing the image from their computer screen during the broadcast, I noticed that after sending the last task, G, they quickly switched to the page with the results, and thought: then everything is fine, passed. It was not a task that should have been abandoned if the answer was wrong. ", - the coach shares.

Traditionally, like this year, the contest lasted for five hours. During this time, participants must solve practice-oriented problems. The peculiarity of the competition is that teams of three people sit in front of one computer. Therefore, in addition to logic and the ability to work under pressure, they must show the skills of team play and the correct distribution of roles. In order to solve some problems, it is enough just to be careful and attentive, the organizers of the championship note. Other tasks require in-depth knowledge of various algorithms. The result of the team's work is most often a certain software that meets the specified conditions. Problems are checked automatically according to tests that are compiled in advance by the jury, and the solutions are checked in real time. The completeness and speed of the task is taken into account, as well as the number of attempts that the team made when solving a particular task. Teams do not always have time to cope with everyone. Such stringent conditions correspond real life: after all, a client can simply refuse the services of a programmer if the second wastes the first's time and resources.

To get to the ACM ICPC finals, you first had to go through a local selection at your own university. Usually more than 300 thousand people take part in these events. Then they pass, in which leaders are determined, worthy of the final. ICPC Champions receives the World Championship Cup and a substantial cash prize, which this year equals 15,000 US dollars. The rest of the prize-winning teams also do not leave without material rewards.

The International Collegiate Programming Contest has been held annually since 1977 under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM, headquartered in New York). This year, the ACM ICPC has once again set a new record for the number of participants. A total of 46,381 students from nearly 3,000 universities participated in the regional qualifying rounds. Just over 40,000 programmers competed in the championship last year. According to statistics from the organizers of the event, the number of participants has increased by 2000% since 1997, the year when IBM began to support the championship.

The ACM-ICPC 2017 World Programming Championship final took place in Rapid City (USA) on May 24. The team of the St. Petersburg Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (SPbNIU ITMO) became the absolute champions, solving 10 problems out of 12 faster than their rivals. The St. Petersburg university has set a new record in the history of the competition: ITMO University teams have become its winners for the seventh time, which has never been possible for any university in the world.

And who are our heroes?

The winning team consisted of three students from the Department of Computer Technologies, Vladimir Smykalov, Ivan Belonogov and Ilya Zban. The head coach of the team was Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Technologies, Candidate of Technical Sciences Andrei Stankevich, who last year received the ACM ICPC Senior Coach Award for the fact that for 15 years his wards passed to the final of the competition.

The ACM-ICPC 2017 gold medalists included St. Petersburg State University (last year's winner), Warsaw and Seoul universities. Silver medals ACM-ICPC 2017 were awarded to teams from Fudan University, Peking University, Xinhua University and MIPT. “Bronze” was taken by representatives of the University of Tokyo, the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, the Ural Federal University and the Korea Institute of Advanced Technologies.

In total, 133 teams from all regions of the world participated in the ACM-ICPC 2017 final this year. The competition itself has already been held 41 times.