Early morning on 5 April, ECNU ranked at 41st place in the 43rd World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) at the University of Porto in Portugal.

The ECNU team comprised three undergraduates from the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering: Zhang Yuge, Lin Fangxin and Zhou Yiran, all of whom tied for 9th place among the other Chinese finalists.

 

ECNU's team with ACM-ICPC's executive president.

 

ECNU team ranks at 41st place.

 

The finals took place after the winning teams ousted 1,000 others from Chinese universities after rounds of Asia regional competitions.  

The premier global programming competition and often referred to as the “Olympics of Programming Competitions, ACM-ICPC is conducted by and for the world’s universities. The ACM-ICPC is also the oldest and most prestigious programming contest in the world, which gives students a platform to test their abilities in creativity, teamwork and innovation while under pressure to build and compete with new software programs.

For more than four decades now, the competition has been raising the aspirations and performance levels of generations of students in computing sciences and engineering. The contest operates autonomous regional contests covering six continents, at which every year it culminates in a World Finals with contestants from all over the world.  

In the contest, teams consisting of three students from the same university work together to solve a variety of programming tasks, with eight or more problems simulating complex, realistic applications. The students are given a computer and a problem statement to which they must come up with a solution according to a five-hour time limit. The team that solves the most problems, with the fewest attempts and under the least cumulative time, is declared the champion.

Since the ECNU team performed well in the finals - displaying astute and calm behaviors - they were able to answer all five of the questions competently.

It is worth mentioning that ECNU took home the gold prize in the ICPC Challenge, another contest before the ACM finals where they outscored all the other 124 teams with a total score of 184.49 points.

Cao Guitao, deputy Party chief and vice head of the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, and the team's instructors Xiao Chunyun and Du Yugen were present at the finals.