Four U-M programming teams compete in ACM Regional Contest; one advances to World Finals

Four University of Michigan programming teams have competed in the 2013 ACM East Central North America Regional Programming Contest, with one team finishing in second place and qualifying to compete in the upcoming 2014 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals, which takes place in Ekaterinburg, Russia from June 22 – 26, 2014.

Regional competitions for the highly competitive ACM ICPC have been taking place all over the world, with results available from this page. The East Central North America Regional Programming Contest was held November 9th and took place simultaneously at four sites: Cincinnati, Grand Valley, Windsor, and Youngstown. The U-M teams competed at the Grand Valley site. Of over 30,000 contestants from over 2300 universities in 91 countries on six continents that competed in regional competitions, only 120 teams will advance to the world finals.

In the East Central regional competition, the top four teams were:

1.  Carnegie Mellon University CMU1 team
2.  University of Michigan Victors team
3.  Carnegie Mellon University CMU2 team
4.  University of Toronto Blue team

Of these, the first two teams will go on to the World Finals. During the competition, the teams were given nine problems to solve in five hours. The Victors and the two Carnegie Mellon teams solved seven of the nine and all other teams solved six or fewer.

At the Grand Valley site where U-M competed, the top five teams were:

1.  U-M Victors
2.  U-M Valiant
3.  Hope College
4.  U-M Conquering Heroes
5.  U-M Champions of the West

The Victors team, which will advance to the world finals, consists of undergrad students Yujie An, Zhou Sun, and Chun Wu.

The Valiant team consists of undergrad students Abhiram Krishnan, Ben Mehne, and Wei Chen. The Conquering Heroes team consists of undergrad students Shuo Yang, Nghia Vo, Stephen Zhu. The Champions of the West team consists of undergrad students Lili Su, Zhizhong Zhang, and Gulshan Singh.

This amazing performance by all of the teams was enabled by the efforts of head coach Prof. Kevin Compton and assistant coaches Mark Gordon and Dennis Matveyev. Gordon, currently a CSE graduate student, competed on the U-M team that placed 2nd in the 2011 world finals and on the one that placed 14th in the 2010 world finals. Both of those teams were coached by Compton and Matveyev.

Many photos from the regional competition are available here, courtesy of Dennis Matveyev.