IIT Roorkee team bags 56th Position at ICPC World Finals in Beijing

NEW DELHI, MAY 9: The Indian Institute of Roorkee students have come second among the Indian teams in World Finals of 42nd ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC World Finals) held at Peking University, Beijing, China.

IIT Roorkee’s ‘Team Triangulation’ was one among the only eight teams from India and 140 teams from all over the world to qualify for the finals of the event.

Team Triangulation bagged 56th Position and 68th Rank in ACM ICPC, an annual multi-tier programming competition, widely regarded as ‘the Olympics of programming’ and among the hardest programming competitions in the world. Position is based on number of problems solved irrespective of time (team solved four problems) and Ranking is based on time taken to complete these problems.

The ACM-ICPC (Association for Computing Machinery-International Collegiate Programming Contest) is a multi-tier, team-based, programming competition. Headquartered at Baylor University, Texas, it operates according to the rules and regulations formulated by the ACM. The contest featured 50,000 participants from over 3,000 universities spread across over 100 countries and 6 continents

Speaking about the performance of IIT Roorkee team in this global competition, Dr. Balasubramanian Raman, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Roorkee, and Team coach, said, “It is great to represent India. My team “65thBit” entered world finals in 2013 and now this is my second experience. It is great experience with awesome students and with the International participants and coaches. I hope to coach more students in the coming years.”

The ACM-ICPC is similar to the International Science, Maths and Informatics Olympiads for school students. Qualification to the world finals is widely considered to the one of the most prestigious achievements for a student programmer.

Team Triangulation comprised Adarsh Kumar, Fourth Year, Mechanical Engineering, Saharsh Luthra, Fourth Year, Computer Science and Engineering and Vaibhav Gosain, Fourth Year, Computer Science and Engineering.

Speaking about the experience, Adarsh Kumar said, "It has been our dream to represent IIT Roorkee at the World Finals since the past four years in college, and we have been preparing for qualification to the Finals right from first year. It was certainly a great experience participating, with some of the best programmers from around the world attending the event."

Teams are given a problem set of about ten algorithmic programming problems to be solved in Five hours. Contestants have to write the source code of computer programs which are able to solve given problems. The problems given are mathematical or logical in nature, and test the teams on various fundamentals of theoretical computer science, such as: combinatorics, number theory, graph theory, computational geometry, string analysis and data structures.

Like any other sport, being able to compete at the top level takes years of intense study and practice. Most World Finals qualifiers have been competing in similar competitions for over three years and it is common for participants to have started competing much earlier in school.

IIT Roorkee has been regularly qualifying to the world finals since the past few years, having qualified 5 times in the past 6 years, a rare feat for any Indian institution. This year’s edition was held at Peking University, Beijing, from 15th - 20th April 2018.