UCT team wins the 2015 IT Challenge finals

The UCT team “this was easier last year” has won the finals of the 11th edition of the IT Challenge programming contest held on August 24, 2015, in Johannesburg at the Standard Bank headquarters. The students of the 3-person team, being Ashraf Moolla, Kyle Levin, and Robert Spencer, solved 6 programming problems in the 6-hour long non-stop contest with just one machine to code the solutions. Thanks to their knowledge, skills, and persistence, they managed to beat the best teams of 8 other South African universities and the three Standard Bank teams.

They started off with lightning speed, solving the first problem in a mere 5 minutes and 17 seconds into the contest time, and four problems in the first hour including the problem that gave them a time bonus, which resulted in the odd scoreboard standing of negative time. Then they faced the tougher problems to solve as well as the NMMU and Wits teams catching up in number of solved problems. The UCT team, however, did manage to solve two more problems in the remaining time, including the interactive problem (a game played against other teams’ solutions), so overall they won with a considerable margin.

Ashraf, Kyle, and Robert won a Dell tablet as first prize, and UCT will receive 170000 Rand as winning university. The prize money is used for additional programming activities for undergraduates, such as the mini-contest earlier this year, the 1016 Challenge, training sessions on team programming and algorithms, and the ICPC regionals and finals.