The ACM ICPC 2018 Asia-Amritapuri Multi-site Regional Contest was held on December 29, 2018, at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri and Coimbatore campuses This years’ ICPC Asia-Amritapuri multi-site regional contest witnessed more than 275 teams from premier institutions like IITs, IIITs, NITs and IISc from India and Bangladesh. This included 10 high school teams also. The winners from every semi-final will be selected for ICPC World Finals, which is scheduled to happen at Portugal in April 2019.
The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is an algorithmic programming challenge for college students. The ICPC is considered as the ‘Olympics of Computer Programming’ with annual participation of 50,000 students from more than 2000 universities, spread across more than 100 countries, in 6 continents. Also known as the ‘Battle of Brains’, the oldest, largest, and the most prestigious programming contest in the world has been attracting the best coders from around the world. The event is organized by ICPC Foundation, in association with Jet Brains s.r.o. In India, this contest is supported by Directi and the event is hosted on the company’s Code Chef platform.
In the contest, 3-member university teams challenge each other in solving a set of more than 10 gruelling problems within a five-hour time period. In order to excel, every team needs to leverage their skills and capabilities in problem-solving, coding, teamwork, innovation, creativity and knowledge of data structures and algorithms to solve the maximum number of problems with least penalties. Since 2004, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham has been organizing the Asia-Pacific regional contest of ICPC, the semifinal before the world finals.
Dr. K. Sankaran, Registrar, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham and Dr. Sasangan Ramanathan, Dean, Faculty of Engineering have inaugurated ICPC at Amritapuri and Coimbatore campuses respectively. The event was organized by the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Schools of Engineering, Amritapuri and Coimbatore campuses with Anand Shenoy as Regional Contest Director (RCD) of ICPC.
In the semifinals, IIT Kanpur emerged as the winner and the second and third prizes were won by teams from IIT Roorkee. A team from Professor K. K. Anand’s Smart Minds Academy, Chennai, has won in the schools’ category. Dr. Bhushan Patwardhan, Vice-Chairman, University Grants Commission (UGC), distributed the prizes to the winning teams.
