Nine tasks and Highest Honors

The 49th ICPC World Finals took place in Baku from August 31 to September 5 - and the KIT team Kindergarten Timelimit achieved an impressive result. With nine solved tasks and the award Highest Honors it sent out a clear signal: We are one of the best teams in the world.

Jonathan Dransfeld, Lucas Schwebler and Yidi Zang had already qualified for the World Finals by taking first place at the Northwestern European Regional Contest 2024 (NWERC). Over the past few months, they used the time to train intensively - preparation that paid off.

Yidi shone in the actual competition: after just 23 minutes, he was the first to solve task 1 correctly - a remarkable start. The team successfully completed a total of nine tasks, the same number as one of the gold-winning teams. Only a penalty time of eight minutes prevented them from reaching the podium and winning a bronze medal.

However, with 13th place in the overall standings and the Highest Honors award, the KIT team achieved its best result to date at the World Finals. This shows not only individual strength and team spirit, but also how competitive KIT is on an international level.

The ICPC World Finals are the last round of the ICPC and comprise twelve algorithmic problems. It is important to derive a solution quickly and then implement it as precisely as possible. The tasks come from subject areas such as graph theory, numerics, geometry, number theory and dynamic programming. Coordinated group work, wide-ranging knowledge, efficient and error-free work and the recognition of edge cases are particularly important in this competition.

The ICPC is considered one of the most important student programming competitions and is organized every year by the world's largest computer science association, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). After the various regional competitions, there is also a global final. The tasks at the ICPC range from tricky implementation tasks to tasks on the design and implementation of algorithms and data structures to algorithmic geometry and mathematics.

The next ICPC World Finals are scheduled for fall 2026 - hopefully with KIT participation again. The Northern European preliminary round, where this could succeed, will take place at KIT in Karlsruhe in just a few weeks! If you would like to help with the organization or want to participate yourself, please visit the Discord server of the Scalable Algorithms research group of T.-T.-Prof. Thomas Bläsius and find out more there.