International Collegiate Programming Contest

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The International Collegiate Programming Contest ( ICPC ), until 2018 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest , abbreviated to ACM-ICPC , is an annual, global, multi-stage programming competition for university students. The competition challenges and promotes the skills of the participating teams of three in the areas of problem analysis, software development and teamwork. The competition is organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the main sponsor is IBM . The organizational center is located at the University of Baylor, while the individual regional pre-competitions are partially organized and carried out autonomously.

history

The history of the ICPC can be traced back to a programming competition held at Texas A&M University in 1970 . This was organized by the Alpha Chapter of the Upsilon-Pi-Epsilon Association. The competition remained local until 1977, this year it was held for the first time as part of the ACM Computer Science Conference . From 1977 to 1989 only teams from the United States and Canada took part. Since 1989, the organization headquarters of the competition has been at Baylor University .

With the increasing number of regional preliminary competitions (regional competitions) held worldwide, the number of participants increased enormously. The financial and personal support from sponsor IBM since 1997 also contributed to this increase. In 1997, 840 teams from 560 universities took part. Nine years later, in the 2006 competition, 6,099 teams from 1,756 universities in 82 nations took part. The number of participants increases between 10 and 20% every year.

Rules of the competition

The ICPC is a team competition. A team consists of three students who must have received less than five years of university education. A qualification for the final is only possible twice.

During the competition between eight and ten programming tasks must be solved within five hours. C , C ++ and Java are available as programming languages . The programs created are sent by the participants to a server, which uses specially developed test data to check the function of the programs. The teams are notified of the outcome of the test within minutes about the correctness or errors of the program.

The winner is the team with the most solved tasks. If several teams have solved the same number, these teams are ranked according to the speed of problem solving. For this purpose, the times between the start of the competition and the submission of the correct solution are added up for each team. For each incorrect submission of the program, 20 "penalty minutes" will be awarded. However, these are only taken into account if the problem can actually be solved by the end of the competition.

The rules mentioned apply in this form in particular to the final competition. The rules of the regional qualifications are largely based on these, but may differ in detail.

Compared to similar programming competitions, such as the International Computer Science Olympiad , the ICPC has to solve a comparatively large number of tasks (eight to ten) in a short time (five hours). It is true that at the ICPC it is not individual people but teams of three who work on the solution, but only a computer is made available to them. In order to be successful, in addition to knowledge of algorithms and programming, teamwork skills and the ability to work precisely under time pressure are required.

Regional eliminations and world finals

The competition is carried out in several phases:

  1. Many universities organize local competitions to determine the participants they send.
  2. The first official phase, the regional preliminaries (Engl. Regionals ). Depending on the regional competition, two to a maximum of three teams from one university may take part, but a maximum of one team per university can qualify for the final. The first-placed teams from all regionals qualify for the final competition. These competitions take place at different times in late autumn.
  3. The world finals are held in a different country each spring. 88 teams were invited to the final of the 2006 competition, which took place in March 2007.

Some larger regions have also organized so-called superregionals in recent years . These are unofficial intermediate stages between the Regionals and the finals, to which the best-placed teams from several geographically related regions are invited. Such a competition is also planned for Europe in the future.

Final 2005

Opening ceremony 2005

The 2005 World Finals took place on April 6, 2005 at the Shangri-La Hotel Pudong in Shanghai , China . It was organized by Shanghai Jiaotong University . 4109 teams from 1,582 universities in 71 countries took part in the preliminary rounds, 78 of which were invited to the final. The team from Jiaotong University was able to win the title in the “home game” with eight out of ten solved examples, the second at this university.

Final 2006

The 2006 finals were held in San Antonio , Texas and organized by Baylor University . 5606 teams from 1,733 universities in 84 nations took part in the preliminary rounds, 83 of these teams were invited to the final. The team from the Saratov State University from Russia won the title, solving six out of eight examples.

Final 2007

The 2007 World Finals were held March 12-16, 2007 at the Hilton Tokyo Bay , Tokyo , Japan . 6099 teams took part in the Regionals, 88 of which were invited to the final. The University of Warsaw won the competition with eight out of ten solved tasks.

winner

The winners ( World Champions ) of the competitions since 1977 are:

swell

  1. ↑ ICPC factsheet 2006
  2. ^ The Rules of the 2008 ACM-ICPC World Finals

Web links