Students ace programming contest

While Bezdrighin and Yao had already competed together a year before, they only became a team with Röyskö after the ICPC Swiss Subregional Contest, a qualifying event hosted at ETH by the Association of Computer Science Students (VIS). They were also assigned a coach, Master’s student Konstantin Wohlwend. Wohlwend participated in the contest himself a few years back, but has since found organising the subregional and coaching teams to be more rewarding. "The team is smarter than me, so I didn’t have to train them", he chuckles, "but I helped them with organisational things and travel."

Preparation pays off

After the Subregional, the team participated in Southwestern Europe Regional Contest (SWERC), which was held online. "We messed up in the Regional and almost didn’t qualify for the finals", Röyskö recalls. The finals themselves were delayed due to the pandemic, so that one and a half years passed before lETHargy travelled to Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, for the main event. "We are grateful to Professor Juraj Hromkovic and his group for their support with the travel", says Wohlwend. "He has been supporting our efforts at SWERC and ICPC for many years." Professor Hromkovic is the Chair of Information Technology and Education at the Department of Computer Science and the head of the Center for Computer Science Education (ABC).

The students didn’t get to see much of Dhaka, although Röyskö recalls good food and terrible traffic. "There wasn’t an official excursion this year", says Yao. "But this just gave us time to prepare and to iron out any issues. For example, they used a keyboard layout we weren’t familiar with, so we used the extra time to figure out how to remap the keys properly."

While the contest is an extracurricular activity, the students feel that the practice has helped their studies. "I started competitive programming in high school and I was able to take Master’s level courses in the first semester of my computer science Bachelor’s thanks to it", says Röyskö. "I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys theoretical computer science." Yao has also reaped the benefits during his Bachelor’s studies: "I took some courses on computer architecture, which is a very different area from theoretical computer science. Still, I was able to finish my coursework faster than my peers thanks to my experience in competitive programming", he states. "And let’s not forget", Wohlwend adds, "it’s fun! If you are a competitive person who likes to measure yourself up against others and improve, it’s the perfect thing for you."