Programming contest "Santa's Algorithmic Challenge" 2014
© 2014 EPFL
The second edition of the programming contest "Santa's Algorithmic Challenge" was held on Monday, December 15th, 2014. The goal of the competition was to promote interest in algorithms...
The second edition of the programming contest "Santa's Algorithmic Challenge" was held on Monday, December 15th, 2014. The contest consisted of 8 algorithm programming tasks that were solved by teams of up to two EPFL students. The goal of the competition was to promote interest in algorithms, programming and problem solving. Due to the considerable interest, the contest was expanded and held in two separate rooms that could accommodate 70 teams and over 130 students.
With outstanding performance – solving 7 out of 8 problems in 2 hours and 5 minutes – the best Bachelor team was "Havana Blues", which consisted of Aimee Montero and Alfonso Peterssen, both 2nd-year Bachelor students in Computer Science. Their performance was particularly impressive as they also excelled against teams consisting of Master students.
There were only two teams that performed even better: "SandyClaws" consisting of Raziman Thottungal Valapu (PhD student in Engineering) and Andrii Maksai (PhD student in Computer Science) and the winner Marek Cygan (researcher from the University of Warsaw). Both teams solved all 8 problems but Marek did it in the extremely impressive time of 1 hour 21 minutes. It should be said that it is no shame losing to Marek. He is regarded as one of the worlds' best competitors in programming competitions and he has previously won the Google code jam (which is one of the biggest worldwide competitions of this type).
The event was successful thanks to support from our industrial sponsor Yandex – which provided generous prizes and the IT system used to check student responses in real time – as well as thanks to help from experienced volunteers.
The EPFL student organization PolyProg also contributed and the EPFL's Theory of Computation Laboratory supplied food and beverages.
Finally, we would like to thank all of the participants for making the event such a success. We look forward to seeing you again next year at Santa's Algorithmic Challenge 2015!
Pictures from the event are available here: http://theory.epfl.ch/osven/Santa2014
