Three students from the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, recently qualified for the world finals of Association for Computing Machinery — International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC). The contest is headquartered at Baylor University, Texas, USA, and is one of the world’s oldest programming competitions. While around 2,736 universities from over 102 countries participated in the contest, only a few made it to the finals. The team that qualified from Hyderabad, comprises three B.Tech computer science students — Vanjabe Rajas Mangesh, Tanuj Khattar and Sriram Narayanan.
“It’s a five-hour-long competition that focuses on problem-solving. Every team is given around ten algorithmic problems to solve. The problems are in 150-200 lines of coding. Once teams submit their solutions, they are verified to see if they produce expected results,” says Tanuj. “We had also secured the first position in India finals. But the world finals is going to be even more tough. So we are preparing for it by participating in mock contests,” he adds.
The final contest is set to be held in Rapid City, South Dakota, USA from May 20-25 this year. Rajas, who was introduced to programming and algorithms when he was in Class 11, says, “We are trying to minimise the errors that we made previously. We are also working on our time management skills.” Sriram adds, “No Indian team has ever won this competition. The top ranks have always been dominated by the Russians. The highest rank an Indian team achieved was only 18, so we definitely want to get a better rank than that. We are learning constantly and are trying to improve our knowledge.” In their free time, the students enjoy playing basketball and reading books. After finishing their education, they plan on becoming software programmers.
