MAI Students Reached the Final of the International Programming Contest
“Kudos to the fierce programmers of team MAI#3.” So the official twitter of the 43rd Annual World Finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) commented getting into the final the team of Moscow Aviation Institute. This prestigious competition has been held since 1977.
Students of Faculty No. 8 “Information Technologies and Applied Mathematics” Sergey Gorelyshev, Oleg Zimakov and Nikita Mikhailov under the leadership of Valentin Zaitsev and Andrey Zhuravlyov became winners of the All-Russian Olympiad and the international semi-final, and won a ticket to the final for the fifth time.
The students practice constantly: on Sundays they have competitions of the Open Cup named after E. V. Pankratiev in programming. They participate in personal competitions on the Codeforces portal and in international training in programming held in various cities of Russia and the world.
“At competitions we must write programs that solve the tasks. That is, we need to find the relevant solution algorithm, investigate it analytically, and only then program it. The main thing is to meet certain limits,” - said Sergey Gorelyshev. – “For each task there is a time limit and a memory limit. If the program uses more time or memory, the solution will not be counted.”
At competitions, a set of 8-13 tasks is usually offered, programming is performed on one computer for 5 hours. During this time you need to solve the largest number of tasks with the least number of errors. Given this, the skills of effective and well-coordinated teamwork come to the fore. Verification of solutions is carried out using an automatic testing system. Tasks, submitted not on the first try, are penalized with 20-minute “bonuses” for each unsuccessful attempt.
“We didn’t expect that we would go that far - a very high competition,” - admitted MAI students. – “But now we want to gain a foothold at a good level and perform no worse than our predecessors!”
In the competition they came by the invitation of Valentin Zaitsev, associate professor of the Faculty. “As Valentin Evgenievich himself says, these Olympiads are much more interesting than auto racing. Here at the same time there are drive, courage, entertainment and competitive spirit, the ability to solve mathematical, algorithmic problems, quickly and accurately program and debug, team play.”
The 43rd Annual World Finals of the ICPC will be held in Porto (Portugal) from March 31, to April 5, 2019. The teams of 137 world leading IT universities, selected from 3,038 participating universities from different countries, will take part in it. 31 teams from MAI participated in them.
