UCI Programming Team Heads to North America Championship
For the second year in a row, a team of UC Irvine students is headed to Orlando, Florida for the North America Championship of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), the world’s oldest and largest programming competition. What’s different this year for team members Elijah Huang, Jerry Li and Thomas Neill — all students in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) — is that their trip to the championship falls on the heels of their appearance at the World Finals in Luxor, Egypt in April! The team hopes their showing at the championship on May 23–28, 2024 earns them a return trip to the World Finals.
Lessons Learned in Luxor
“The scale and grandeur of the World Finals was impressive,” says computer science major Huang, noting that this was UCI’s third appearance at the finals for ICPC. Moving up 16 spots from 2014 and 2017, this was UCI’s best showing yet, but the team is confident they could do even better.
“Our performance during the contest itself was certainly a learning experience — we faced some implementation difficulties that held us back from solving one or two more problems that were ‘solvable’ at our skill level,” says computer science and math double major Neill. “But on the bright side, it motivated us all to practice more in preparation for the North America Championship!”
Returning to the Championship with Sharpened Skills
“We’re grinding hard for redemption,” says Huang. The trio of students are building on lessons learned in Luxor as they prepare for the championship, where they will again tackle real-world problems related to trustworthy software systems. “We’re shooting for a medal again this year!” says Neill. Their bronze-medal finish last year was their ticket to the World Finals, and they all agree that with each ICPC experience, they are further boosting their programming skills.
“It has enhanced my ICS education in many ways, even the practice that preceded these actual larger competitions,” says Li, who will be graduating with his bachelor’s degree in computer science this year. The practices are run through the ACM@UCI student club, which meets twice a week to solve problems related to a certain topic, such as dynamic programming or greedy algorithms. Associate Professor of Teaching Michael Shindler helps lead the club and the various ICPC teams.
Shindler was impressed with the team’s performance at the regional competition, earning them a spot at the championship as the second place school in Southern California. “For four of the 11 problems in the regional contest, UCI was the first university to successfully solve it, the first of which our students solved 3 minutes and 4 seconds after the start of the competition!”
“Competitive programming has definitely led to a huge improvement in my problem-solving skills,” says Neill. “Regularly approaching an entirely new problem and implementing a solution has made me a faster programmer in my project courses and helped me pick up new ideas more quickly in my theoretical courses.”
For more information on how to get involved with UCI’s official competitive programming club, visit ACM@UCI.
— Shani Murray