On Sat, 10 Nov 2018, the UT Programming Club won the ICPC South Central USA Regional Competition at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. The winning team, consisting of Ethan Arnold ('19), Ryan Rice ('19), and Supawit Chockchowwat ('20), will compete in the ICPC World Finals this coming April in Porto, Portugal.

 

The competition consisted of 70+ teams from 25+ schools (approx. 225 students) from across Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. UT Austin's top team solved 11 of the 12 problems, more than any other team. UT Austin's other three teams came in 2nd (Aditya Durvasula, Jake Crouch, James Dong), 4th (Davis Robertson, Ho-Jae Jung, Kevin Chen), and 8th (Kevin Li, Lucas Gretta, Ritvik Annam).

 

UT has been competing in the regionals since 1997. This is UT's third consecutive win. UT went to the 2016 world finals in South Dakota and the 2017 world finals in Beijing. UT has seen marked improvement since the creation of a new elective, CS104c: Competitive Programming, taught by the faculty coaches Etienne Vouga and Glenn Downing and the student officers of the UT Programming Club.

 

The ICPC traces its roots to 1970 when the first competition was hosted by pioneers of the Alpha Chapter of the UPE Computer Science Honor Society. The initiative spread quickly within the United States and Canada as an innovative program to raise increase ambition, problem-solving aptitude, and opportunities of the strongest students in the field of computing.

 

Over time, the contest evolved into a multi-tier competition with the first championship round conducted in 1977. Since then, the contest has expanded into a worldwide collaborative of universities hosting regional competitions that advance teams to the annual global championship round, the ICPC World Finals.

 

The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is the premier global programming competition conducted by and for the world’s universities. The ICPC is affiliated with the ICPC Foundation and is headquartered at Baylor University.

 

The contest fosters creativity, teamwork, and innovation in building new software programs, and enables students to test their ability to perform under pressure. The contest has raised aspirations and performance of generations of the world’s problem solvers in the computing sciences and engineering.