The team of Nizhny Novgorod State University named after Lobachevsky (UNN) won the Champions Cup in the final of the most prestigious international competition in programming among university teams ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest).
Recall that in 2021 the final of the world championship was held in Moscow for the first time. The Russian team won this prestigious international competition, taking not only the highest award – the cup, but also three of the four gold medals, as well as one bronze. The national team of UNN became the owner of the main prize and one of the gold medals. Teams from St. Petersburg University ITMO and MIPT also received gold medals. Bronze went to the HSE team. Let us remind you that earlier our students have already become world champions 14 times, and for the last 8 years they simply have not let go of the winner’s cup. And now – the ninth victory in a row.
After Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin met with the winners in Moscow, the citizens of Nizhny Novgorod returned home in absolute triumph.
To become the first among 59 thousand participants, to get ahead of programmers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford, Moscow State University is an incredible result.
“The guys knew that this was the last chance,” explained the team leader, associate professor at the Institute of Information Technologies, Mathematics and Mechanics of the NNSU (IITMM) Nikolai Borisov. – In this championship there are restrictions on both the age of the participants and the number of performances in the final. Five years ago we won bronze at the ICPC in Thailand. And so I wanted to win.
Of the five-year-old team, only Nikolai Kalinin, a graduate of the Higher School of General and Applied Physics of the UNN, remained in action. This year he was joined by graduates of the IITMM NNSU Aleksey Danilyuk and Valeria Ryabchikova. The team was coached by graduates of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics Alexey Shmelev and Vladislav Epifanov.
“The tasks were very difficult,” Nikolai Borisov continued. – In the “C ++” language, it was necessary to solve 15 cases in five hours. For example, calculate the coordinates of the domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral from photographs, find the best routes between cities, compare two geographical maps with each other. For every mistake – penalty points.
To become the first among 59 thousand participants, ahead of the Cambridge programmers, is an incredible result
According to the results of the final round, Nizhny Novgorod residents completed the maximum number of tasks – 12. Their closest rivals – teams from Seoul University and MIPT – coped with only eleven.
How does it feel to “code” for several hours in a row, and can the competition tasks be “tied” to real life?
“You’ll hardly meet the championship tasks at every step,” said Nikolai Kalinin, an old-timer of the Nizhny Novgorod team. – In sports programming, tasks are set mathematically strictly, and the solution must find the absolutely correct answer under any conditions and at the same time keep within certain restrictions. In everyday life, there is always a balance between speed, stability and program complexity. However, simpler and more well-known algorithms found in the world of sports programming are often used in the development of highly loaded systems, for example, servers with a load of at least 150 client requests per second.
And the rector of UNN, Elena Zagainova, noted that the victory became possible also because the university has been engaged in Olympiad programming since the 90s of the last century.
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The ICPC has been held since 1977. Russian students, who have been participating in the competition since 1995, have won only 80 medals, 33 of which are gold. 3406 universities from 104 countries of the world took part in the 2021 championship. The title of ICPC World Champion opens doors for winners to any IT company in the world.
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