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The University of Western Australia has qualified to compete in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals in Phuket, Thailand held in May 2016.

ICPC is a multitier, team-based, programming competition operating under the auspices of Associate for Computing Machinery (ACM), which held their regional contest in New Zealand on Saturday 26 October 2015, where all Australasian and South Pacific universities were invited to compete.

UWA’s team, “Off by Wonders”, were one of the 12 teams from Australia to participate, which included The Faculty of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics students Andrew Gozzard, Emma Krantz, Max Ward-Graham and coach Yuki Osada.

During the contests, programmers or teams of programmers, were given a complicated problem to solve and have to write a program to solve it under a strict time limit.

“The problem set was very difficult, and UWA did very well to solve three problems, very quickly. This was sufficient for them to come second in the South Pacific Region,” said Tim French, Senior Lecturer of Computer Science and Software Engineering.

“To do this, UWA had to beat the best programmers from Australia and New Zealand coming second only to University of New South Wales, but beating teams such as The University of Melbourne, The University of Sydney, The University of Queensland, Monash University, The University of Adelaide, and The University of Auckland.”

This will be UWA’s second year in a row at competing in the ICPC World Finals which is one of the most intellectually challenging computer programming competitions in the world.

Many of the technology industry’s best and brightest, including Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Google employee #1 Craig Silverstein, and Quora founder Adam D’Angelo, were all one-time finalists in the IBM-sponsored ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC).

Media references

Jacqueline Alliss (Faculty of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics)    (+61 8) 6488 2577