3/16/2023 Aaron Seidlitz, Illinois CS
Coached by Illinois CS professor Mattox Beckman, the team Unbengable came in first place and will move on to the North American Championship held in Orlando this May.
Written by Aaron Seidlitz, Illinois CS
On February 25, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign hosted the International Collegiate Programming Contest’s (ICPC) Mid-Central Regional. One of the teams from Illinois, Unbengable, won first place in the competition to earn a spot in the North American Championship held this May in Orlando.
Coached by Illinois CS professor Mattox Beckman and Electrical & Computer Engineering student David Zheng, Unbengable included Illinois CS professional master's students Xi Chen and Zhenwei Hu, as well as second-year undergraduate student David Fu. Together, they solved 11 of the 13 problems successfully.
Two other teams from Illinois, UIUC-B and UIUC-C, earned silver medals by solving eight of the 13 problems.
In total, 91 teams competed in this ICPC stage, across multiple host sites. At each of the host sites, only the top four teams move on to the North American Championship.
“I’d like to first mention a special thank you to all the teams and coaches that joined us here, as well as the Illinois Programming League student group for their help with logistics. Also, our student coach, David Zheng, was instrumental in organizing the training of our teams,” Beckman said. “It’s always a joy to be a part of ICPC and to help these amazing students who enjoy the competition so much. All our teams thrive off the effort of each member, as they embrace this challenge and display their unique talents.”
ICPC is an enormous competition in scope, as it includes more than 50,000 students, more than 3,000 universities and 400 on-site competitions per year.
The problems are designed to test logic, strategy, and mental endurance. The teammates collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds, and build software systems that solve the problems under the intense scrutiny of expert judges.
The University of Illinois has a rich history competing in ICPC. And just shy of two years ago, the team Must Pass became the school’s first to ever medal in the ICPC World Finals.