On Sat, 9 Nov 2019, the UT Programming Team won the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) South Central USA Regional Competition at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. The winning team, consisting of Aditya Durvasula ('19), Aaron Lamoreaux ('23), and Viraj Maddur ('23), will compete in the ICPC World Finals this coming June in Moscow, Russia.

The competition consisted of 60 teams from 25+ schools (approximately 180 students) from across Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. UT Austin's top team solved 12 of the 12 problems. UT Austin's other three teams came in 3rd (Aditya Arjun, Kevin Li, Luke Gretta), 4th (Jake Crouch, James Dong, Kevin Chen), and 6th (Alex Hong, Davis Robertson, Tres Brenan).

UT has been competing in the regionals since 1997. This is UT's fourth consecutive win. UT went to the 2016 world finals in South Dakota, the 2017 world finals in Beijing, and the 2018 world finals in Portugal. 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, in conjunction with the student officers of the UT Programming Contest.

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 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.