Latvian Team First Qualifies For ACM- ICPC’ s Finals

„The contest lasted for five hours. Our team  Unusual demonstrated one of the best results among the other teams, solving six out of eight competition problems. Solutions to the fifth and sixth problems were submitted just 11 and 3 minutes before the fixed time. The team solved two more problems but failed to introduce the necessary corrections due to lack of time. The other UL team ranked in 44th place, which is believed to be high and scores additional points and quotas for both - the region and the UL,” said Guntis Arnicans, Associate Professor of the UL Faculty of Computing (FC). 217 teams participated in the contest. Unusual ( Eduards Kalinicenko, Jevgenijs Vihrovs and Normunds Vilcins) ranked in 22nd place, but the team Hyperdrive ( Agnis Arins, Arturs Backurs and Krisjanis Prusis)- 44th place. Latvian teams have also shown outstanding results among the Baltic States. Vilnius University got the 78th place, University of Tartu - 103th, Kaunas University of Technology - 104th. the UL won the 13th place, which made it possible to be selected for the finals. „ This success proves that we must not paint our situation in very gloomy colours. Despite the short financing in some educational areas, we have been able to produce ground-breaking results and become one of the top universities in the world,” said Juris Borzovs, Dean of the UL FC. Last year 24,915 students from 2,070 Universities, representing 88 countries, participated in the ACM- ICPC. The 2012 ACM- ICPC World Finals is to be held in Warsaw, May 14- 18, and 105 teams will participate. Guntis Arnicans, Associate Professor of the UL FC, and Rihards Opmanis, PhD student, prepared the UL teams for the contest while Sergejs Melniks, Progmeistars Ltd., and senior lecturer, assisted  in training Unusual.

Translated by students of the professional study programme Translator of the University of Latvia.