HSE Students Win Bronze in International Programming Contest

Fourth-year HSE students Ivan Safonov and Mikhail Anoprenko of the Faculty of Computer Science have won a bronze award in the International Collegiate Programming Contest. The competition finals were held in Moscow on October 5. Students from HSE University’s campuses in Moscow and St. Petersburg took part in the competition, with the team from Russia’s second city placing 19^th overall.

The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is a major international student competition in algorithmic programming. The finals were originally scheduled for summer 2020, but were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On October 5, 2021, 117 teams from over 60 countries came to Moscow to compete.

The qualifying process for ICPC finalists comprises several stages. Universities around the world are divided into regional categories with their own semi-finals. Every year, a set number of teams from each region goes through to the finals. Twenty teams from the Northern Eurasian region (which covers Russia) made it to the finals, where each university campus can field only one team. This year’s finalists included a team from the HSE University Faculty of Computer Science in Moscow, as well as students from the HSE campus in St. Petersburg.

‘I’ve taken part in IT competitions for many years, since I was a school student. My teammates and I already knew each other from various school competitions and camps,’ explained Mikhail Anoprenko, a fourth-year student of Applied Mathematics and Information Science. ‘We ended up at the same university and decided to put a team together for the ICPC. We did well—we made it to the finals, which were finally held recently.’

The team was made up of three students of the bachelor’s programme in Applied Mathematics and Information Science: fourth-years Mikhail Anoprenko and Ivan Safonov and third-year student Vladimir Romanov.

‘We prepared for the competition by doing team training exercises, taking part in team camps, and running lots of personal contests,’ Ivan Safonov explained. ‘The Faculty of Computer Science provided bursaries to support us.’

Ivan also admitted that the team encountered some difficulties in the days leading up to the finals: team member Vladimir Romanov was denied entry to the competition. ‘Vladimir was removed from the competition at the start of October. He hadn’t received a [COVID-19] vaccine for medical reasons. We spent a lot of time and effort in the days before the competition defending our right to participate as a three-person team,’ the students explained. In the end, Ivan Safonov and Mikhail Anoprenko took part as a two-person team.

‘The tasks in the final were essentially the same as those in other programming competitions. You’re given the parameters of the task and have to write a program that reads input data, solves the task and outputs an answer,’ explained Mikhail Anoprenko. ‘The tasks in the final were quite complex, but that was to be expected, and we had solved tasks from previous competitions as part of our training.’

The team from HSE University in Moscow managed to achieve excellent results despite the challenges faced and the absence of a team member, finishing in the bronze category alongside teams from MIT, Kharkiv National University of Radioelectronics and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [Editor’s note: there are 12 winning places in the ICPC, with four winning teams each receiving a set of gold, silver or bronze medals.]

Mikhail Gustokashin, Team Trainer, Director of the Centre of Student Competitions and the Faculty of Computer Science

Every student in our faculty has had some experience with competitive programming. They use automated systems for checking tasks and study the kinds of algorithms and data structures that also appear in competitions. We have tried to take the best parts of programming competitions and include them in the learning process. Winning another ICPC medal is a sign that we are able to find and train some of the best students in the world. The fact that all HSE students study programming means that anyone can try their hand at the ICPC qualifiers, which will be held in October and November this year.

The team from the HSE University campus in St. Petersburg also achieved impressive results. Doctoral students Egor Bogomolov and Igor Labutin and Software Development and Data Analysis graduate Nikita Podguzov came 19^th in the competition, and also won a prize for being the first to solve problem M of the competition.