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The Local Selection Contest 2015 jointly organized by ETH and EPFL was great success with 69 students participating (37 from ETH, 29 from EPFL, 3 from FHNW). The results are the following:

Congratulations to Johannes Kapfhammer, Demjan Grubic, Kieran Nirkko, Martin Raszyk, Gilles Englebert and Fabian Lyck for making it into the first and second team of ETH and to qualify for SWERC 2015. Hopefully they can repeat their great results and reach the world finals held in Thailand in 2016.

Thanks a lot to our sponsors Ergon and Quatico Solutions AG who allowed us to have plenty of food during the contest finishing of with a big apero in the end.

Here are some pictures of the contest:

The ETH ACM ICPC Local Contest will take place on Saturday, October 10, 2015.

The competition is individual (no teams) and held according to the usual ACM format: 5 hours, 5 to 10 problems, allowed languages: C, C++, Java. Two teams will be formed from the best eligible participants (enrolled at ETH and meeting the eligibility requirements).

The first three eligible participants will form the first ETH team in the Regional Contest. The second ETH team will be formed from the next three eligible participants who are also eligible and willing to compete for ETH next year. In case a participant selected according to this rule solved less than three problems, the committee reserves the right to select another person instead.

Those teams will represent ETH at the Southwestern Europe Regional Contest in Porto, Portugal held on November 21st and 22nd. Similar to last years, we are delighted to hold the contest together with EPFL in Lausanne (PolyProg, note that the contest is joint, but SWERC teams are not).

Schedule of Local contest: 10 October 2015

• 11:00 Meeting in the VIS Bureau (CAB E 31), breakfast, late registration.
• 11:30 Briefing, last questions, seat allocation.
• 12:00 Contest starts (CAB H56/H57).
• 17:00 Contest ends.
• 17:15 Announcement of results.
• 17:30 Apéro.

Please register for the contest here: http://swerc.hc2.ch/.

Should I show up? Why not? In particular, consider coming if any of the following holds:

• You have any sort of interest and/or experience in competitive programming
• You are curious after the first weeks of Algolab or ACM lab.
• You like mathematical puzzles and don’t mind implementing solutions in C++/Java.
• You simply suspect that this sort of competition might be fun.

There are no prerequisites except for basic C++/Java (in particular basic I/O and STL in case of C++). Before the contest we will introduce the rules and the system to the newcomers.

Rules: The local contest is a “closed-book” competition. No materials are allowed, i.e., no books, cheat sheets, Internet etc. The language references for C, C++ and Java will be available. For the detailed rules, consult “Contest Rules“. You may also wish to take a look at the team manual for the judging system.

Lastly, note that you need access to the CAB Building. All CS students should be able to access the building with their Legis. You can request an access code here: https://www.bi.id.ethz.ch/eAdressen/
If you are not a CS student and cannot access the building, please contact us at acm_at_vis_dot_ethz_dot_ch, so that we can open the door.

DANIEL GRAF – senior problem resolver

Why does ETH send three students to the African desert? Answer: So that they can spend five hours in front of a computer trying to solve as many problems as 127 other teams from all over the world. In other words: to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals in Marrakesh, Morocco [1].

Continue reading “Report ACM ICPC World Finals 2015 in Marrakesh”

Tomorrow (May 20th) the ACM ICPC World Finals take place in Marrakech, Morocco. ETH will be represented by Andrei Parvu, Martin Raszyk and Daniel Graf, who went through both the ETH internal selection contest and the South Western European Regional Contest in order to get here. The contest will take place between 11:30 am and 5:00 pm Zurich time with live coverage available at http://icpclive.com/. Furthermore live streams can be found at Twitch and YouTube:

– http://www.twitch.tv/icpclive1
– http://www.twitch.tv/icpclive2
– https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDBXshZdICEHr0HSVsLrydA

 

Deutsche Version

The Helvetic Coding Contest is Switzerland’s greatest algorithmic programming contest. It will be held on Saturday March 21st at EPFL in Lausanne. Similar to the ACM ICPC, participation is in teams of three bachelor, master, or PhD students sharing one computer.

The ACM VIS will cover the participation fees for all VIS members and reimburse the train ticket to Lausanne (up to halb-tax, and max 73 CHF, but we encourage you to buy a day pass from your commune): when registering simply indicate “VIS” as your affiliation and use this form to claim your travel expenses.
If your team consists of a majority of VIS members, the participation fees for the whole team will be covered: the non-VIS student should select “Guest of VIS” as his affiliation.

For more information and to register, consult the official website: http://hc2.ch/e.
Please direct your questions (also ETH-specific ones) to: info@hc2.ch.

Daniel Graf – coding competition correspondent

Programming can also be a team sport. If you don’t believe me, you probably have not heard of the ACM ICPC yet. Besides the annual Turing award the Association for Computing Machinery also crowns the best student programming team each year in its International Collegiate Programming Contest [1]. Every year, more than 10’000 teams code in the regional contests across the globe to win one of the 120 spots in the world finals. And this year, our ETH VIS team qualified for these finals again!

Continue reading “Report ACM ICPC SWERC 2014 Porto”

The Local Selection Contest 2014 jointly organized by ETH and EPFL has passed with 45 students participating (27 from ETH, 18 from EPFL). The results are the following:
http://blogs.ethz.ch/acmicpc/files/2014/11/final-standings.png 

Congratulations to Martin Raszyk, Andrei Parvu, Daniel Graf, Johannes Kapfhammer, Kieran Nirkko and Luc Haller for making it into the first and second team of ETH and to qualify for SWERC 2014. Hopefully they can repeat their great results and reach the world finals held in Morocco in May 2015.

Thanks a lot to our sponsors Microsoft and Quatico Solutions AG who allowed us to have plenty of food during the contest finishing of with a big apero in the end.

Continue reading “Local Contest 2014 – Results”

The ETH ACM ICPC Local Contest will take place on Saturday, October 11, 2014.

The competition is individual (no teams) and held according to the usual ACM format: 5 hours, 5 to 10 problems, allowed languages: C, C++, Java. Two teams will be formed from the best eligible participants (enrolled at ETH and meeting the eligibility requirements).

Continue reading “Local Contest 2014”

Daniel Graf – Travelling & Solving Problems

This summer, I was among the lucky three who represented ETH at the ACM ICPC World Finals (International Collegiate Programming Contest). We competed against the best 120 teams from around the world and spent three exciting weeks in Russia.

“Welcome to the heart of Russia. Welcome to Yekaterinburg. A city with 1.5 million citizens and an over 300 year old history. […] Yekaterinburg is a unique megapolis. On the border of Europe and Asia we have taken all the best from the east and from the west. […] It is the place where you can become an ACM ICPC 2014 champion. Добро пожаловать!”

This is how we and a hall full of excited young math and computer science students were greeted in a pretty epic opening ceremony. It was full of spectacular dances, orchestral music and also featured the cool video I just quoted. Even Vint Cerf made an appearance – in the form of a Jor-El-style video message. So how did we get there?

Continue reading “World Finals 2014 Report”

A short summary of the ACM ICPC 2014 World Finals in Ekaterinburg:

Results
Problem set

There were more than 120 teams participating and 12 problems, which turned out quite difficult: four problems were not solved by anyone and only 13 teams managed to solve more than three problems.

ETH Zurich team managed to score two problems, ending in a large group of teams on places ~45-80 (counting time penalties it was 65th place). The winners turned out to be St. Petersburg State University with seven problems solved.

Congratulations to all participants and ETH team! Now it’s time to start thinking about the 2015 Finals due to be held in Morocco. The first step is, as usual, the Local Contest, which will most probably take place in the first half of October 2014.