A Ukrainian student team was ranked 11th and awarded with a bronze medal at the 40th International Collegiate Programming Contest of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM ICPC).
This year, 128 teams took part in the finals held at Prince of Songkla University in Phuket, Thailand.
By solving nine out of thirteen problems, the Lviv National University team a.k.a. ‘LNU Pinguins’ managed to maintain Ukraine among the winners, following gold and silver medals in 2008 and 2013.
The Lviv ‘Pinguins’ Roman Bilyi, Vitalii Herasymiv and Taras Savitskyi were coached by Vasyl Biletskyy and supported by MacPaw, a Kyiv (Kiev)-based software developer.
The winner — coming ahead of teams from Harvard and the MIT — was a team from Russia’s St. Petersburg State University (SPbU). Stanislav Ershov, Igor Pyshkin and Alexey Gordeev managed to solve 11 problems out of 12 within a five-hour timeframe.
SPbU teams had already won the contest three times: in 2000 and in 2001, when their team included Nikolay Durov and Andrey Lopatin, who later became lead developers of the Vkontakte social network; and in 2014, when the contest was won by Egor Suvorov, Dmitry Egorov and Pavel Kunyavsky, who had been coached by Andrey Lopatin.
This Russian team was sponsored by leading Russian social network Vkontakte as well as by Victor Shaburov, founder of Looksery, a Ukrainian startup which was acquired by Snapchat last year.
Shaburov told Ukraine Digital News that he sponsored 10 teams from Russia and Ukraine in total.
Russian teams have won the contest for five years straight now.
For the past three decades, the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest has been the most prestigious intellectual competition for young programmers in the world. Sponsored by IBM, the contest attracts each year tens of thousands of university students from a variety of countries.
The first team competition under the auspices of ACM was held at Texas A&M University in 1970. The contest evolved into its present form in 1977, with the first finals held in conjunction with the ACM Computer Science Conference.
