St Petersburg University students become medallists in All-Siberian Programming Olympiad
St Petersburg University programmers have taken third place in the overall standings of the 22nd Open All-Siberian Programming Olympiad. All told, a total of 149 teams from more than 50 educational institutions in Russia and the near abroad participated in the final round of the competition.
According to the rules of the contest, each team of programmers must consist of three persons. The final takes place in two stages: the first involves the solution of programming problems, and then there is a classical team contest in competitive programming. In 2019, students had to write a programme that could go through as many levels of the game as possible on its own. In 2020, a model of a shipping company was established, and the teams had to come up with the best ways of ‘delivering’ boxes to sorting facilities. And this year, it was necessary to model virtual machine queries in such a way as to best allocate resources.
According to Aleksandr Savchenko, assistant programming coach at the University, during their time at the St Petersburg University Programming School, students not only learn to create algorithms and solve problems, but also prepare to participate in competitions at different levels and work together effectively in groups.
Three teams from St Petersburg University got through the qualifying round and eventually made it into the top 40 of the competition: Andrew Sergeevich (3rd place), Chill Kernel (21st place), and ‘Crazy, you can be the first’ (39th place).
‘This year, despite some difficulties during the first round of the competition, our team ended up among the top three for the first time,’ noted Mikhail Ivanov, a member of the medal-winning Andrew Sergeevich team and a master’s student in the Advanced Mathematics programme. ‘There really can be some tricky problems, including some that require a knowledge of mathematics and others that are implementation dependent and, in order to solve them, you need to create a multiple code, in which it’s easy to make a mistake. But our team has just the right makeup: I like to solve mathematical problems, and my teammates are good at writing different codes, including implementations. So such tasks are right up our alley.’
In addition to Mikhail Ivanov, students of St Petersburg University Egor Gorbachev and Savelii Grigorev rounded out the medal-winning team.