February 8, 2010
Amrita School of Engineering, Amritapuri
 

Ice City Harbin in China was the site of the 2010 World Finals of the ACM-ICPC, the world’s largest inter-collegiate programming contest. Dr. Nandakumar and Br. Anand Shenoy from Amrita also attended.
 

As one of the Asia Regional Centers for the contest, Amrita saw participation from 305 teams that represented 55 universities, last year. Amrita has hosted the Asia Regional of the ACM-ICPC for the past five years now.
 

Worldwide teams compete in some 35 Regionals before being invited to the World Finals. Amrita’s is one of the 15 Regionals held in Asia, and one of 2 in India.
 

103 teams were at the World Finals. Sogang University from Korea that qualified from Amritapuri in December 2009 was at the World Finals too.
 

“Indian programmers, while good at applications and databases, are not competitive in the area of algorithms,” stated Dr. Nandakumar, Contest Director at Amrita. “We want to bring together our college students’ mathematical and programming talents to excel in this area too.”
 

Below is a brief report by Dr. Nandakumar on Amrita’s participation at the World Finals.
 

Three teams that had qualified from Amritapuri were present at Harbin. NIT Trichy and Sogang solved 4 problems each, and DJ Sanghvi College solved 2.
 

The winning team was Shanghai Jiaotong University that solved 7/11 problems. The contest was tough.
IIIT Hyderabad was also at the contest, as they had qualified from the Kanpur site. They solved 4/11 problems.
 

The forthcoming World Finals locations are as follows –
2011 Cairo
2012 Warsaw
 

Amrita proposed to hold the World Finals in Kochi in 2014. The proposal was well received. The organizers liked idea of the beach, Veegaland water theme park, houseboats and warm weather.
 

This year IBM increased Amrita’s funding by 25%. Perhaps it was because we had told them that we want to double number of universities, more than double the number of teams, and make it dual-site at two of our campuses, to facilitate more participation.
 

Harbin is a northern city, and very cold. Harbin Engineering University volunteers did a good job shuttling us around, taking care of us in the cold and dark, and giving us great food. Anand and I enjoyed the fresh green vegetables and great desserts.