Russian students became the winners of the ACM ICPC World Programming Championship in Beijing for the seventh time in a row. Since 2000, this is the 13th victory of participants from the Russian Federation. The team from Moscow State University (MSU) took first place. The second is the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), and the third is Peking University. The winning team will receive a cash reward of $15 thousand. Previously, the first places in these competitions were taken by the teams of St. Petersburg State University (SPbSU), St. Petersburg University information technologies, Mechanics and Optics (ITMO) and Saratov State University. However, the expert community is not inclined to overestimate the successes of Russian programmers, recalling problems in the general level of students’ training.
The finals of the ACM ICPC World Programming Championship, the largest student Olympiad in this discipline, ended in Beijing. 140 teams from 51 countries took part in the championship final this year. Russia was represented by 11 teams representing the Moscow University of Physics and Technology, Moscow State University, ITMO University (St. Petersburg), St. Petersburg State University, High school Economics, Moscow Aviation Institute, Novosibirsk State University, Perm State University, Saratov State University, Academic University (St. Petersburg) and Ural Federal University (Ekaterinburg).
Russian participants won the World Cup and four out of 13 medals, more than any other country.
Teams from China and the USA received three medals each, while Japan, Korea and Lithuania received one each.
Won the World Cup for the first time MSU team Red Panda, having solved 9 problems out of 12 proposed. “Our guys are the best! We are proud,” it says message press service of Moscow State University. “This is MSU’s first absolute victory in ICPC,” the university told Kommersant. The team (traditionally it consists of three people) includes Mikhail Ipatov (student of Mechanics and Mathematics), Vladislav Makeev and Grigory Reznikov (Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics). The team coach is the head of the specialized computer science department educational and scientific center(SSC) named after A. N. Kolmogorov Moscow State University Elena Andreeva.
“MSU teams have been participating in the student team world championship in programming for more than 20 years,” said Ms. Andreeva after summing up the results of the championship. “Many of them won championship medals, several times they were one step away from victory, taking second place. This year, for the first time, our team won the world champion title, beating both the strongest Russian teams from MIPT and ITMO, and the best foreign teams from the universities of Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo.”
The programming championship has been held since the 1970s; teams began winning it in 2000. Russian universities: St. Petersburg State University students were the first to do so.
Since 2012, only Russian teams have won this Olympiad.
The record holder for the number of victories among Russian teams is ITMO University (took first place seven times, including in 2017). This year ITMO University team dropped to ninth position, having solved 7 problems out of 12. At the same time, ITMO remained third among Russian universities participating in the Olympiad. “Programming is becoming a real intellectual sport of the future, no less interesting than, for example, chess, and in this discipline the guys from Russia have no equal,” commented the vice-president of the Russian Union of Rectors, rector of ITMO University Vladimir Vasiliev on the successes of Russian students.
In addition to the MSU team, among the best were MIPT teams(second place) and the universities of Beijing and Tokyo, which solved 8 out of 12 problems and were awarded gold medals.
Seoul National University, University of New South Wales, Tsinghua University, Shanghai University, ITMO, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vilnius University and Ural Federal University completed the competition with a score of 7 out of 12.
“The physics and technology team showed high result, they confidently walked towards victory all year, showed the best result in the entire history of MIPT’s participation in the competition, for which we can congratulate the Cryptozoology team! We are proud of our students,” said Alexey Maleev, team leader, director of the MIPT Center for IT Education. “Moscow has the largest representation among all cities in the world - four universities at once (among the 13 best.- “Kommersant”) defend the honor of the country,” noted Mr. Maleev. “Moreover, 10 out of 13 attended the Moscow Workshops ICPC school on the basis of MIPT.” “This proves that programming education in our country is one of the best in the world. Congratulations to the MIPT team and all Russian programmers!” - MIPT Rector Nikolai Kudryavtsev emphasized.
Teams of three students no older than 25 years compete in ICPC. Students who have participated in the world finals twice are not allowed to participate in the championship. The team has only one computer at its disposal, so in addition to logic and the ability to work within tight time frames, the contestants must demonstrate team interaction skills and correctly distribute roles. The team that solves correctly wins greatest number tasks and at the same time showed best time; The number of attempts made, or “submissions” (this is the name given to a solution to a problem sent to the testing server for verification), is also taken into account.
All ICPC winners receive a cash prize: champion team - $15 thousand; teams that won gold medals - $7.5 thousand each; silver medalists - $6 thousand each, and teams that took bronze - $3 thousand each.
The victory of Russian students should not be overestimated, says Konstantin Kolin, chief researcher at the Institute of Informatics Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “We won and we won, we are talking about a single success: these are the elite who are trained in leading universities, but you need to look at general level training schoolchildren and students,” the expert said in an interview with Kommersant. According to him, sociological surveys conducted among Moscow schoolchildren last and this year showed that “34% of schoolchildren believe that the sun revolves around the Earth.” “Insanity grew stronger, and the government adopted the Digital Economy program, which requires highly qualified specialists. In order to prepare them, a revolution in education is needed, and it starts with teachers. We talk about this a lot, but so far, unfortunately, the Ministry of Education is not listening to us,” the expert concluded. The Ministry of Education and Science could not promptly comment on the victory of Russian students at the international Olympiad.
Anna Makeeva, Valeria Mishina
The world's largest sports programming competition, the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), may be held in Moscow in 2020. Recently, a delegation led by the executive director of the championship visited the capital to select the site for the finals. Among possible options- city stadiums. Over the past 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 the final part of the 2020 World Cup is scheduled to be held.
Moscow is the real home of the champions of the ICPC 2018 finals and half of this year’s gold medalists,” William Poucher, head of the delegation, executive director of ICPC, and professor at Baylor University, told 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 final and continued Professional Development as programmers and founders of companies highly valued in the global IT industry.
Moreover, over the past seven years, only students from Russian universities - ITMO, St. Petersburg State University, and 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.
This year, representatives from 140 universities from 51 countries competed in Beijing, and the first two places were taken by teams from Moscow State University and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
We deserve this Olympiad,” says Alexey Maleev, MIPT’s vice-rector for international programs and technological entrepreneurship, head of the Moscow Workshops ICPC project. - In Moscow there are not only universities – champions of the Olympiads of recent years, but also the headquarters of all the leading computer companies in Russia.
According to Alexey Maleev, as possible venues for the 2020 World Cup, the ICPC management is considering the 75th pavilion of VDNKh, the Skolkovo technology park and two stadiums - VTB Arena (formerly Dynamo stadium) and CSKA Arena on Avtozavodskaya.
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, broadcast to the whole world, and serious budgets. About 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 grew and daily life, the demand for sports spectacles like rallies or Formulas was formed, supported by the progressive financial capabilities of the industry.
Today, computer technology is going the way of automobile technology: the programmer is no longer a rare professional, like a driver a hundred years ago. Programming has become a mass profession and, increasingly, a hobby for many people around the world. Therefore, broadcasts of the ICPC software championship already attract about a million viewers.
Number of fans in the stands last years reaches several thousand, fortunately, a 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. Over the course of several hours, participants work on 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 competitions. The best solutions are then dissected and analyzed on fan forums, like the chess games of grandmasters.
This is the most prestigious programming competition in the world,” Mikhail Ipatov, a member of the 2018 championship champion team, a fourth-year student at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University, told Izvestia. - We prepare for it all year round to please the fans.
According to Mikhail Ipatov, the MSU team conducts joint five-hour sports training under the guidance of a coach three times a week, and in addition, each team member trains independently every day.
Izvestia Help
The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is held in the form of a championship of student teams. It originated in 1970 at the University of Texas and has been held annually since 1977. Until 1989, the championship was mainly attended by teams from universities in the USA and Canada. But today the championship has turned into a worldwide competition in software sports. In 2018, the ICPC and its qualifying rounds Around 50 thousand took part around the world. best students and 5 thousand trainers from more than 3 thousand universities in 111 countries.
Our heroes: Ivan Belonogov, Ilya Zban and Vladimir Smykalov – ACM ICPC champions/ Photo by icpcnews icpcnews /
results
“It is programmers who will provide answers to many of the challenges of the future”– ACM President Vicki Lynn Hanson
So, this year 46,381 people from 2,948 universities took part in all stages of the championship. 103 countries from six continents joined the competition. The participants of the last stage had no more than 5 hours to solve the final series of problems - in the end, the ITMO University team won an absolute victory, solving the largest number of problems (10 out of 12 possible) with the least number of attempts and spending the least amount of time on it.
In addition to the championship title, gold, silver and bronze medals are awarded at the Olympics (the first 12 teams are awarded). In addition to ITMO University, gold was won this year by teams from the University of Warsaw, Seoul University and St. Petersburg State University. In addition to the St. Petersburg teams, medalists from Russia included teams from MIPT (silver) and UrFU (bronze).
In total, 13 teams from Russia took part in the championship: 3 from St. Petersburg, another 3 from Moscow, one team each from Novosibirsk, Saratov, Tomsk, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Perm and Petrozavodsk.
In addition to the team from the University of Warsaw, among our most formidable foreign rivals were teams from China, Sweden (KTH) and the USA (MIT). As a result, students from Chinese universities (Xinhua University, Beijing and Fudan Universities) took 6th to 8th places, respectively (silver). The Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) won bronze (11th place), and MIT was only in twentieth position (all results of the championship finalists can be viewed).
“These guys solve problems in three minutes. This is incredible, and I like it, because this is what happens when guys are involved in solving problems, when they have resources, passion, and mentors, and they work on it throughout the year,” he said about the finalists Championship Executive Director Bill Poucher.
Problems
By the way, the intrigue in the championship remained until the very final - as the winners themselves and their coach, Andrei Stankevich, admit, the ITMO University team had to compete with very strong opponents, and until the very end it was not clear whether any of them would have time to solve the 11th problem . As the results of the competition showed, not a single team succeeded in this.Students from the School of Mining and Technology of the University of South Dakota (it was in South Dakota that the final of the championship was held this year) in their interview with a local television channel noted that the tasks (aka “problems”) were an order of magnitude more difficult than those for which they themselves were preparing . This team solved only 2 problems.
Students also complained that the methods of teaching sports programming at their university are strikingly different from those used, in particular, by Russian teams. Abroad Russian school programming is really highly rated - for example, last year ITMO University students were recognized as the best programmers in the world according to the Hacker Rank platform.
Returning to the problems: C++ and Java became the most popular languages for solving them. This year's innovation was the ability to solve problems in Python - as noted, this is a serious step for the championship (from the point of view of organizational procedures), but not for the participants themselves - there were not so many solutions in this language.
By the way, you can try to solve all the problems that the championship finalists struggled with on your own - the text of the problems is in the public domain. In addition, the judges of the championship final prepared approximate solutions. By the way, the only problem that remained unresolved during the championship finals was a problem called Scenery (Problem H).
In 2017, 133 teams from all regions of the world took part in the finals of the most prestigious competition among programmers; the competition was held for the 41st time. As a result, the ITMO team became the winner of the ACM ICPC for the seventh time, which no university in the world has ever achieved, the university’s press service said in a statement.
The winners were students of 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, Ph.D. technical sciences Andrey Stankevich. In 2016, he received the prestigious ACM ICPC Senior Coach Award for leading his coaches to the finals of the competition for 15 years.
The other teams in the top four also solved 10 problems, but spent a little more time on it. Thus, the team from the University of Warsaw took second place. In third position are programmers from Seoul national university. The St. Petersburg State University team, champion of 2016, finished with the fourth result.
“The competition went surprisingly smoothly. In some problems, we intuitively relied on facts that we could not fully prove, and our instincts did not let us down. We managed to pass 10 problems in almost four hours, and this gave us a good amount of confidence. But only at the very end, when we passed the tenth problem, I thought: “Okay, apparently I’ll be able to take gold!” - said Ivan Belonogov.
Other Russian teams also won prizes: the MIPT team and the Ural Federal University. In total, in 2017, Russia was represented by 13 teams from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Saratov, Perm, Petrozavodsk, Novosibirsk, Samara, Tomsk and Yekaterinburg. Teams from Russia have been participating in the championship since 1993, and since 2000 they have won the competition 12 times, including this year.
Traditionally, 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 sit in front of one computer. Therefore, in addition to logic and the ability to work under pressure, they must demonstrate team play skills and proper distribution of roles. To solve some problems, all you need is accuracy and attentiveness. Other tasks require advanced knowledge of various algorithms. The result of the team’s work most often becomes some kind of software that meets the set conditions. Problems are checked automatically using tests that are prepared in advance by the jury; solutions are checked in real time. The completeness and speed of completing the task is taken into account, as well as the number of attempts the team made to solve a particular problem. Teams don't always have time to cope with everyone. Such stringent conditions correspond real life, because the client can simply refuse the services of a programmer if he is wasting time and resources.
To get to the ACM ICPC final, you first had to pass a local selection at your own university. Typically more than 300 thousand people participate in these events. Then regional contests take place, in which leaders worthy of the finals are determined. ICPC champions receive a World Championship trophy and a cash prize, which this year is equal to $15,000.
The sports programming championship International Collegiate Programming Contest has been held annually since 1977 under the auspices of the Association computer technology(ACM, New York headquarters).
Previously, Russian schoolchildren won two gold, one silver and one bronze medal at the World Robot Olympiad.
Evgenia Shcherbina
The finals of the ACM-ICPC 2017 World Programming Championship took place on May 24 in Rapid City (USA). The absolute champions were the team from the St. Petersburg Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (SPbNIU ITMO), which solved 10 out of 12 problems faster than their opponents. The St. Petersburg university set a new record in the history of the competition: ITMO University teams became its winners for the seventh time, which no other university in the world has ever achieved.
And who are our heroes?
The winning team consisted of three students from the Department of Computer Technology, Vladimir Smykalov, Ivan Belonogov and Ilya Zban. The head coach of the team was Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Technology, Candidate of Technical Sciences Andrei Stankevich, who last year received the ACM ICPC Senior Coach Award for the fact that for 15 years his players made it to the finals of the competition.
The gold medalists of ACM-ICPC 2017 included St. Petersburg State University (last year's winner), Warsaw and Seoul universities. ACM-ICPC 2017 silver medals 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 Technology.
In total, 133 teams from all regions of the world participated in the ACM-ICPC 2017 finals this year. The competition itself was held for the 41st time.