ACM-ICPC Experience

ACM-ICPC (or, International Collegiate Programming Contest) is a multitier, team-based, programming competition. It is widely considered as the Olympics of programming. Teams from various colleges around India fight against each other in the regional rounds. The top 8 teams get to represent India at the World Finals for the ultimate glory.

I am writing about my experiences for the regional rounds. I came to know about ICPC in my second semester of Engineering. IIT Gandhinagar still does not have a great ‘coding culture’, at least not in Competitive Programming. One of our CS professors told us about the competition, and we started preparing for it, although not too rigorously. Last year, my team qualified for IIT Kharagpur regionals (chronologically, we were the first team from IIT Gandhinagar to ever represent our college at ACM-ICPC). After coming back from the Kharagpur regionals, due to burdensome academics we sidelined Competitive Programming for about half a year.

It was in the summer of 2017, I and my previous teammate Shivdutt Sharma decided to compete again. We included Anmol Gautam in our team. Shivdutt is an Electrical Engineering major but he is very passionate about Programming and Computer Science. Anmol is a CS sophomore and coding is his cardio. After coming back to college, we started preparing by doing challenges on Codechef, Codeforces, Hackerrank, etc. In November, we competed for the online round of ICPC and stood 1st out of the 9 teams who participated from our college. We qualified for 2 regionals, Chennai and IIT Kharagpur. The number of teams had tripled as compared to the last year’s figure of 3, which is a good sign.

Another good thing about ICPC is that you get to travel to different cities. We flew to Chennai in December. It was our first visit to the southern part of India. The Chennai regionals were to be held at Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science. During the contest, we solved 4 out of the 11 given problems and were very close to the 5th one. Last minutes in the contest were nerve-wracking. After the contest day, we roamed around in Chennai, visited different places. It was fun roaming around in a city where nobody understands your language, and neither you understand theirs.

Next stop was IIT Kharagpur. During the contest, we solved 3 out the given 9 problems. The problem set was harder as compared to that of Chennai. It is customary in ICPC to have a gala dinner on the night before the contest, and the food was good. We also wandered through the city of Kolkata, which was quite a great experience!

We also had a great experience meeting some of the finest coders from the country, from IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Roorkee, etc. Overall, it was an enriching journey. I would suggest people who are still in their 1st year or 2nd year to try Competitive Programming at least in one semester. It can be pursued as a hobby, just like playing football. You get to learn various Data Structures and Algorithms which is good if you are a CS student and want to perform well in programming interviews. Since it is a team contest, you get to learn how to perform well in a team, which is one of the most valuable skills to have.

Overall, it was an experience of a lifetime and we would love to participate again in next year’s edition.