The Faculty of Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics and Computer Science of National University of Córdoba (UNC) has been enshrined Latin American champion at the World University of Programming (ICPC).
It is a competition where young programmers from all over the world compete in a variety of problems in languages such as C, C++, Kotlin, Java and Pythonand which is reached after a series of regional instances until it competes for the highest award.
There, among the Argentine universities, in addition to the UNC, the University of Buenos Aires also participated (UBA), which came out first last year.
“It is an event of great prestige worldwide, highly appreciated by many universities and by many companies and industries that participate in it talent hunt here“, tells clarion Marcos Kolodny, coach of the team made up of Mateo Carranza Vélez, Sebastián Marín and Uziel Ludueña. The competition lasts about five hours.
In fact, the World Cup is the latest example of a series of regionalized tournaments. “After passing the national team, which in our case is the Argentine tournament, we move on to the South American. And from there to the World Cup, in which the best 137 teams in the worldrepresenting different universities from all over the planet, they tackle between 10 and 15 problems of an algorithmic nature, data structures, mathematics, geometry, probability”, he explains.
“In teams of 3 and with the use of only one computer, trying to solve the greatest number of problems, the team that solves the most problems is declared the winner or by a tie-break system based on penalties between the teams that solve Problems. themselves who have had problems“, he adds.
To train, the teams use web pages where they can access competitions from previous years. “There you can do what is called a virtual participationwhere a 5-hour timer starts, to try in real time the presentations of the problems of the different teams that have participated in other years”, he develops.
This is the key to evaluating performance: “With this you can measure your performance against the teams that entered the original competition and in turn practice team dynamics, communication, practice learning new techniques, new algorithms and so on,” he says.
Latin American programming champions
“At the Latin American level, winning what we have won, i.e. the prize for the best team on the continent, is a very important thing, at least in our university. In 2019 2019, in Portugal, we obtained the Latin American Championship for our University for the first time, and this is the second“, to remember.
Furthermore, this has an impact on the careers of those who compete: “It has opened very big doors for us on a professional level, it has changed us a lot on an academic level and also on a personal level, because it is a unique experience. It is an experience that unites us a lot on a team level and marks us for the future ”, he develops.
For Kolodny, recognition constitutes “pride”. “It is very nice to be able to represent our University in this way in a example as important as the end of the world”, he closes.
About the ICPC
The International University Programming Competition (ICPC extension) is the leading global coding competition run by and for the world’s universities. It is based at Baylor University, in Texas, United States.
The competition takes place from 1970 and is sponsored by International Business Machines (IBM) and organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
“The competition encourages creativity, teamwork and innovation in creating new software programs and allows students to test their ability to perform under pressure. It has ignited the aspirations and performance of generations of world problem solvers in the life sciences. computer science and engineering”, they explain from their official website.
The winner of the contest gets $25,000, as well as recognition that places any CV in the area above average.
This year the first place went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology of the United States, the second for Peking University of China and the third for the University of Tokyo, Japan.
The 2022 edition was held in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Next year it will be Egypt.
SL
Source: Clarin
