NTU Team Wins First Place at 2018 ICPC Asia Taipei Regional Contest

The Asia Taipei Regional Contest of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), hosted by the NTU Computer and Information Networking Center (C&INC) during November 9-10, drew a total of 116 teams (413 participants) from 38 countries in East Asia (e.g., Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan). In this fierce competition, NTU team won the first place and the opportunity to participate in the World Final to be held at the University of Porto in Portugal in 2019.

The ICPC, also considered as the “Olympics of Programming,” is an annual event organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This contest is regularly attended by students from over 100 countries, and is one of the best occasion for world-leading universities to demonstrate their educational achievements.

The ICPC is divided into two phases: the Regional Contest and the World Final. Notably, the number of participants increased dramatically from 2,520 in 1997 to 50,145 in 2017. Last year, a total of over 15,000 teams from 111 countries across 6 continents took part in over 200 regional contests, among which only 140 teams won the tickets to the World Final held in Beijing.

This year, the competition has become even fiercer, especially when each university was allowed to send only one team, and the number of teams admitted to the final in each regional contest was determined according to the number of participating universities and teams.

In celebration of NTU’s 90th anniversary, the NTU C&INC actively sought the opportunity to host the Asian regional contest, and has successfully held the event in the Sports Center on campus during November 9-10. In the past decades, NTU students have shined at the World Finals, winning the third place in 2010; the fourth place in 1997, 2013, and 2014; and the sixth place (first place among Asian teams) in 2004. By hosting the contest this year, we also hope to increase NTU’s international visibility in the field of information education, and cultivate more talents for both academia and industry.