Briefs · Education and Upskilling
Eleven out of twelve, with two minutes to spare
St. Petersburg State University did not win the programming Olympiad. It solved it.
At the 49th ICPC World Finals in Baku, 139 teams from leading universities had five hours and twelve algorithmic problems. The St. Petersburg team — Polar Bear Transform, Fedor Ushakov, Leonid Danilevich and Maksim Turevskii — solved eleven of them, with only two minutes left on the clock when the final submission landed.
The University of Tokyo finished second, Peking University third, Harvard sixth. That is not a ranking, but rather a map of where the world’s hardest algorithmic thinking now lives.
Firstly, the problems are not puzzles for their own sake. They are the kind of optimisation, graph and number theory that underpins everything from routing to cryptography. Secondly, five hours is not a long time to be perfect eleven times.
Conclusion: the ICPC is not an exam, but rather a sprint in formal wear — polar bear precision, and the bears won.
Summary in our own words. The original belongs to its publisher.