ICPC @ ETH Zurich

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.

Tomorrow (June 25) ETH Zurich team will participate in the ACM ICPC 2014 World Finals contest in Ekaterinburg.

The contest will take place 6:00-11:30 (AM) Zurich time. For details and live feed with studio and commentary you can follow icpclive.com.

Good luck to the ETH team!

Daniel Graf

Programmieren als Wettbewerb?
Die ACM (association for computing machinery) kürt neben dem Turing Award Gewinner jedes Jahr auch das Team der besten Informatikstudierenden im algorithmischen Programmieren. Dies im Rahmen des ICPC, dem International Collegiate Programming Contest [1]. Jährlich nehmen weltweit Tausende von Dreierteams an regionalen Wettbewerben teil und kämpfen um einen der begehrten Plätze am Weltfinal.

Continue reading “SWERC 2013 Valencia Report”

After a first and a second team were determined in the Local Contest, they went to Valencia in November to represent ETH at the Southwestern Europe Regional Contest (SWERC). They did so very successfully, since the first team managed to get the second place, allowing them to represent ETH at the ACM-ICPC World Finals 2014 in Ekaterinburg, Russia. Daniel Graf, a member of the first team, wrote an article about the trip to Valencia. It includes pictures and can be found here (German). The final scoreboard is accessible via this link.

Deutsche Version

The Helvetic Coding Contest is Switzerland’s greatest algorithmic programming contest. It will be held on Saturday March 15 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 71 CHF, but we encourage you to buy a day pass from your commune): when registering simply indicate “VIS” as your affiliation.
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.