UCT team wins prestigious ICPC SA Regional programming contest

The Southern Africa Regional contest of the prestigious ACM International Collegiate Programming Contests (ICPC) was held recently, of which 15 teams of 3 students participated at the Western Cape site in Cape Town, out of an overall of 71 teams that participated from across Southern Africa, including other teams from South Africa (mainly UP, WITS, SU, UKZN), and from Benin, Cameroun, Niger, Nigeria, and Togo.

Of the top-10 teams, UCT teams scooped 1st place, and 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9 in the overall classification.

The overall winning team was “Amazingly Complicated Macros”, consisting of Ashraf Moolla, Robert Spencer, and Robin Visser, and they will represent UCT in the ICPC Finals in Thailand next year, where they will compete against the top-1% of other regions in the world for best problem-solving and programming team. They were the only team to solve 6 contest problems. University of Stellenbosch came 2^nd (having solved 5 problems) and UP 3^rd overall (4 problems solved). In the Western Cape site classification, UCT's "It Could Possibly Compile" —made up of Calvin Brizzi, Jarred de Beer, and Steven Rybicki—came 3^rd (4 problems solved, with a small time difference).

The two UCT teams consisting entirely of 1^st-year students did extremely well: they came 5th and 6th place overall, also having solved 4 problems: “Hold my beer, I can do this” (Luke Taylor, Ryan Broodryk, and Udarshan Oodit) and “Just Doing Java” (Jonathan Bouwer, Jonathan Alp, and Dylan Sims), respectively. The novel ‘persistent programmers’ prize at the Western Cape site—most wrong submissions before getting it right—went to “Just Doing Java” after many laughs, as they took 7 attempts to finally solve Problem B (axles, white balloon).