Students of the University of Warsaw from Poland won the silver medal, taking 8th place in the 45th edition of ICPC 2022 finals in Bangladesh. A year ago the medal of the same color was won by the University of Wrocław, which took 5th place.

ICPC is the oldest and most prestigious team programming competition in the world. Initially, only North American universities participated in them, but since 1989 they have been held internationally.

This year’s edition of the competition was as unusual as the previous one. It was because, due to the pandemic, the finals were held two years after the regional qualifiers in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka. Despite the sanitary restrictions, 3-person representatives of 132 universities from 45 countries participated. There were 12 complex algorithmic problems to be solved. The final results were determined by the number of solved tasks and time.

Results

Poland was traditionally represented in the finals by the same universities as in previous years. There were:

• the University of Warsaw
• the Jagiellonian University
• the University of Wrocław.

The best was the University of Warsaw, whose team won the silver medal for 8th place with 8 solved tasks. Its leader was Łukasz Kondraciuk, and Dawid Jamka and Konrad Paluszek also performed in the band. It is an excellent result, bearing in mind that Kondraciuk has been living in San Francisco for a year, working for Open AI. It made practically impossible to train with colleagues before the competition. Prof. Jan Madey was the coach of the team and Wojciech Nadara was a co-coach. The second, who is the two-time medalist of the ICPC finals in 2016 (silver) and 2017 (gold), won the 2nd (!) place in the competition for coaches. The Jagiellonian University took 21st place, and the University of Wrocław – 24th, solving 7 tasks each. These are decent results, considering that 8 teams did not solve a single task, 12 only 1, and 20 only 2.

The MIT team won the competition by solving 11 tasks correctly. Gold medals were also won by:

• Peking University from China (10 tasks)
• Tokyo University from Japan, and Seoul University from South Korea (9 tasks each).

So Asians dominated because the MIT team consisted entirely of naturalized Chinese, including the coach.

The best European university, ETH Zurich from Switzerland, was 5th. It was followed by the teams of the University of Paris and Carnegie Melon, also solving 9 tasks. The University of Warsaw was the fastest among those that solved 8 tasks. They all received silver medals.

Read more about ICPC 2021 Finals in Moscow here.