NTU Team awarded 4th place in 2014 ACM International Programming Contest

The NTU team’s (starting third from right) Prof. Pu-Jen Cheng, Ting-Wei Chen, Pao-Yu Chien, and Jui-Min Lee posing with 2014 ACM ICPC event organizers.

The 2014 Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM ICPC) ended with National Taiwan University’s team of three undergraduate students taking home fourth place on June 26.

The ACM ICPC, held annually, is regarded as the Olympic contest in computer programming and is given the utmost attention by world-famous IT companies such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Facebook. The contest is open to all universities worldwide whereby each college is represented by one team consisting of three students. The contest takes the form of six problems ranging from advanced Math, complicated algorithms to programming skills, and competing teams are graded according to the time and accuracy used to solve the problems.

This year, a total of over 10,600 teams from 2,286 universities in 94 countries competed in the preliminary Regionals. Under the guidance of Professor Chiou-Shann Fuh (傅楸善) and Professor Pu-Jen Cheng (鄭卜壬), the NTU team, which included Ting-Wei Chen (陳庭緯), Jui-Min Lee (李瑞珉), and Pao-Yu Chien (簡伯宇), was one of the top 122 teams to be selected into the World Finals which took place in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

During the World Finals, NTU successfully solved all six problems within five hours and defeated many internationally renowned colleges in obtaining the fourth place in the competition. This is the third time that NTU has won a medal at the ACM ICPC within the past five years. The team’s outstanding performance, as a result, is exemplary of NTU’s successful efforts to foster world-class talents in computer science.