Best Ever Performance by an Indian College at the World's Toughest Programming Contest ACM ICPC

IIIT-H team TuringMachine has come off with flying colors finishing top 18 at the World Finals of ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) 2012. The World Finals was hosted by the University of Warsaw, Poland, on May 14-18, 2012.

This is the best ever performance achieved by an Indian team in the history of the ACM ICPC, which is quite simply the world's oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest.

The contest, an annual event, attracts the best and brightest of students and faculty in computing disciplines from around the world. The 2012 edition drew for the first stage over 30,000 participants on more than 7,000 teams, representing around 2,200 universities, in over 85 countries, on six continents.

IIIT-H is tied at the 18th place with the famed technology innovator Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, which had twice received gold medal at the contest in 2007 and 2008. IIT Delhi too figured at 18.

The other Indian institutes in top 100 are IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras, and Chennai Mathematical Institute.

Team TuringMachine comprised:

Coach and mentor: Prof. Vikram Pudi, Research Associate Professor, CDE, IIIT-H

Prof. Vikram has been IIIT-H's official coach for IIIT-H teams participating at ACM ICPC events for seven years now.

Below are the results of IIIT-H's participation at the contest over the past four years.

About ACM ICPC
The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is a multi-tier, team-based, programming competition, headquartered at Baylor University, USA. The contest involves a global network of universities hosting regional competitions that advance teams to the ACM ICPC World Finals.

The contest fosters creativity, teamwork, and innovation in building new software programs, and enables students to test their ability to perform under pressure.

ACM ICPC is a Fiercely Fought Battle of the Best Brains
The contest pits teams of three university students against eight or more complex, real-world problems, with a grueling five-hour deadline. Huddled around a single computer, competitors race against the clock in a battle of logic, strategy and mental endurance.

Teammates collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds, and build software systems that solve the problems under the intense scrutiny of expert judges. For a well-versed computer science student, some of the problems require precision only. Others require a knowledge and understanding of advanced algorithms. Still others are simply too hard to solve – except, of course, for the world's brightest problem-solvers.

Judging is relentlessly strict. The students are given a problem statement – not a requirements document. They are given an example of test data, but they do not have access to the judges' test data and acceptance criteria. Each incorrect solution submitted is assessed a time penalty. You don't want to waste your customer's time when you are dealing with the supreme court of computing. The team that solves the most problems in the fewest attempts in the least cumulative time is declared the winner.

To learn more about the ICPC, please visit http://icpc.baylor.edu or http://acmicpc.org.

ACM-ICPC Official site: http://cm.baylor.edu/welcome.icpc

About ACM-ICPC 2012:
http://cm.baylor.edu/ICPCWiki/attach/staticResources/Factsheet.pdf

For more details of IIIT-H team's programming and complex problem solving talents or challenges at ACM ICPC, contact either of the below:

- Prof. Vikram Pudi, coach and mentor of TuringMachine

D: 040 6653 1191, E-mail: vikram@iiit.ac.in

- Mr. Anil Kishore, MS by Research CSE, third year

Chief coordinator and mentor, IIIT-H Programming Club
M: +91 95027 04562, E-mail: anilkishore@research.iiit.ac.in

Anil helped Prof. Vikram coach and mentor the team and was supposed to have accompanied the team as on-site coach, in place of the official team coach. However, neither could travel due to other professional commitments.

Media contact:
Mr. Jayadev GAG, IIIT-H Communications Office, M: +91 98666 90917, E-mail: jayadev@iiit.ac.in.