NTU Won Third Place in 2010 ACM ICPC Contest

The finals for the 2010 International Collegiate Programming Contest organized by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM ICPC) ended on a perfect note from February 1st to 6th in Harbin, China.

The ACM ICPC is an international problem-solving contest in programming for the colleges and universities in the world. Every team consists of three persons, who need to share one computer to solve complex and difficult problems within five hours, and the problems include advanced mathematics, complex algorithms and programming techniques. In addition to problem solving, the teams also compete on speed and accuracy, and only the regional top teams get to enter the finals.

As ACM ICPC is the most representative international programming contest in the field of information engineering, every year it attracts the top schools in the world to send teams to compete. In this year's contest, 1931 universities from 82 nations participated, and a total of 7319 teams vied for the right to the finals.

Since the annual ACM ICPC is considered as the Olympic Games in programming design, National Taiwan University has no reason to be absent. After a fierce battle for the right to the finals, NTU had three teams that emerged triumphant in the Asian regional, and one team was appointed to represent NTU in the finals. The team members were: Chun-Sung Fung, Po-Lung Chen, and Shan-En Huang. The finals were held in Harbin, China, and only the universities that were ranked among the top 103 in the preliminaries could enter the finals.

Under the guidance of Professor Chiou-Shann Fuh and Professor Pu-Jen Cheng, the NTU team solved six problems in the finals and won the third place(gold medal), beating a number of internationally renowned universities. This was by far the best result for Taiwan in its many years' participation. The championship was won by the Jiao-tong University of Shanghai, and the runner up was the Moscow University of Russia. This outstanding performance not only affirmed the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering's efforts toward talent cultivation, but also fully demonstrated NTU's excellent competiveness in international programming contests.