On March 25th, a Tongji University team won the gold medal in the 47th International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) Asia Regional Contest.
Gold medal winners
The 47th Huawei Cup ICPC Asia Regional Contest organized by the EC Committee of ICPC Asia and sponsored by Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., was held at Shanghai University from March 24 to 26, 2023. More than 880 contesters and coaches from 280 official teams from universities in mainland China and Hong Kong participated in the contest. After five hours of fierce competition, the Long Day Will End team composed of a postgraduate student of the Year 2022 JIANG Ziheng, undergraduate student CHU Deming of the Year 2019, and undergraduate ZHU Zekai of the Year 2021 won a gold medal; and the Dalabengba team members SUN Zhihong, LIU Yiyang and ZHANG Letian, all of the Year 2021 won a silver medal while the All Purple team made of ZHANG Xiang of 2021, WANG Mingbang of 2021 and LUO Jun of 2020 won a bronze medal. All of the students were from computer science and engineering except ZHANG Xiang who from software engineering. YE Chen and ZHU Hongming, teachers from the College of Electronic and Information Engineering and the School of Software Engineering supervised the university teams for the contest.
Participating students pose for their victories
ICPC is an extra-curricular, competitive programming sport for students at universities around the world. It was initiated and hosted by the Computer Science Honor Society in 1970. It is recognized as it is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest in the world that has attracted the largest number of participants. It is known as the "Olympics" and "the most brain-burning competition" in the computer industry. The competition results have been widely recognized by academia and the IT industry. Graduates who achieved good results in ICPC contests have remained popular among leading IT enterprises at home and abroad.
ICPC competitions provide gifted students opportunities to interact, demonstrate, and improve their teamwork, programming, and problem-solving process. Competitors are expected to not only solve a specified problem, but also to solve the problem in the best way. ICPC covers a wide range of knowledge, which is directly related to undergraduate and graduate courses such as programming, discrete mathematics, data structure, artificial intelligence, algorithm analysis, and design, and is highly demanding for mathematics. Because the contest is set in English, participants are expected to be good in English, too. ICPC asks for three people to work in a group by sharing a computer, which calls for teamwork spirit. At the same time, because there is no ready-made algorithm for the problem, the contest presents a challenge for innovation. Teams of three, representing their university, work to solve the most real-world problems, fostering collaboration, creativity, innovation, and the ability to perform under pressure. In a word, ICPC requires not only a solid foundation in academic knowledge, but also overall quality and ability.
(Photo/Ye Chen)
