Three École Polytechnique’s students at the ICPC world finals in Bangladesh

A team of three École polytechnique students was among the participants in the world finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), which took place from November 6 to 11 at the University of Asia Pacific in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Composed of Marc Dufay, a Polytechnique engineering student, Matthias Hasler, an MSc&T student, and Pedro Cabral, a Bachelor's student, the X team went there to challenge the other finalists in the prestigious international programming contest.

Open to students from universities around the world, the ICPC is an annual team-based algorithmic programming competition. Each team, consisting of three members, is given a dozen algorithmic problems and must solve as many as possible in five hours using a single computer to write the programs in C, C++, Java, Python or Kotlin.

École Polytechnique’s team had been training for months, accompanied by the School's Department of Computer Science Teaching and Research (DIX), which offers many courses and events to support students in this discipline at the School.

More than 60,000 programming students from over 3,000 universities in 115 countries participate each year in the qualifying rounds for the ICPC finals.

Marc Dufay, Matthias Hasler, and Pedro Cabral were preselected by the School for intensive training, based on their experience in Olympiads and their level in mathematics. They then trained assiduously and also participated in three courses that Hang Zhou, assistant professor at École Polytechnique, offers to help students prepare for the programming contests: "International Collegiate Programming Contest Training", "Competitive Programming" and "Algorithms and Advanced Programming".

A final selection at the end of the School's intensive training allowed to identify the best students who were then able to participate as a team in the "Southwestern Europe Regional Contest (SWERC)". Among the top 2% of teams at SWERC, the X team qualified at SWERC in March 2021 for the ICPC finals, which were not held until November 2022 due to the health crisis related to the Covid-19 epidemic.

The École Polytechnique’s trio ranked 73rd out of 132 ranked teams.