UT programming team successful in international competitions

A student team from the University of Tartu is the only one from Estonia to get through to the ACM programming contest held December 3-4 in Russia, Georgia and Kazakhstan. Recently the same team was also awarded third place in the International IEEE Xtreme programming contest, which so far is the best result in Estonia and the whole of Baltics.

The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Xtreme International programming contest was held for the 10th time on October 22 and participants included 1 823 teams from more than 50 countries. Estonia was represented by 13 teams altogether with 5 from the University of Tartu and 8 from Tallinn University of Technology.

Members of team VertexCover that achieved the respectable third place include computer science bachelor student Oliver-Matis Lill and two mathematics bachelor students Andres Unt and Oliver Nisumaa.

Representative of the student team Oliver-Matis Lill was happy with the final results as there were many strong teams participating in the competition. „Of course it would have been great to come in second place, which we missed only just. Nevertheless, our team had a very strong advantage because we have all competed in olympiads and we are active competitive programmers with thousands of hours of experience in algorithm problem solving, “said Lill.

The students were supervised by IEEE proctors at the University of Tartu – associate professor in distributed systems Benson Muite and Associate Professor of Computer Vision and Robotics Engineering Gholamreza Anbarjafari. Benson Muite said that it was a great achievement to have three teams from the University of Tartu in the top100 and Narva College also participating for the first time.

IEEE Xtreme is a 24-hour competition where teams of students need to solve 24 problems. In order to do so students need to know algorithms, data structures and problem solving approaches from different fields.

The next challenge for the team is representing Estonia in the ACM North-Eastern European Regional Contest, held on December 3-4 in Russia, Georgia and Kazakhstan.

Additional information: Oliver-Matis Lill, representative of the student team, 566 75728, olivermatislill@gmail.com