UCT scoops 1, 2, 4, 5, and 8th place in the top-10 of the IT Challenge Heats

The yearly team programming contest “IT Challenge” organized by Standard Bank saw 18 teams from UCT participate in the qualifying ‘heats’ last Saturday on April 16 in the packed Senior lab, among some 100 teams from universities across South Africa. Teams of 3-4 students have only one PC to solve as many problems as they can in the 4-hour non-stop contest. This year, the winning team, “BetaGo” composed of Taejun Park, Robert Spencer, and Robin Visser, broke the records by having solved all six problems in a mere 2.5 hours. They will represent UCT in the finals in Johannesburg in August.

Second place for UCT and in the overall classification was “Limpopo Algorithms”, consisting of Kieren Davies, Kiuran Naidoo, and Anna Borysova, having solved 5 problems, and third place among the UCT teams was “Several Brilliant Information Theorists”, consisting of Jacques Heunis, Jethro Muller, and Nabeel Parker, who together solved 4 problems. Noteworthy is also that a team consisting entirely of 1^st-year students reached 16^th place, ahead of the best teams of some other universities: “Florence and the Machine Code”, made up of Ben Adey, Hezzel Gonese, Graeme Harris, and Rob Wood (3 problems solved). They all received prizes from the UCT Computer Science Department, besides the goodies and pizza from Standard Bank for all UCT students who participated in the contest.

The final standings for all teams who submitted at least one possible solution for the Heats problems are listed on the scoreboard