Ecole Polytechnique: ICPC: Ecole Polytechnique’s team in the world Top 25 and 1st among French teams

École Polytechnique’s team involved in the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) ranked 24th in the world with “High Honors” and ahead of all the teams from South-West Europe. This is the best performance ever recorded by a team from a French higher education and research institution in an ICPC world final.

The ICPC is an annual competitive programming team competition open to students from universities around the world. Each team, consisting of three members but only allowed to use one computer, is given ten algorithmic problems and five hours to solve as many of them as possible.

École Polytechnique’s team was composed of two Bachelor students, Khanh Nguyen and Thanh Vinh Nguyen, and Louis Abraham (X2015). They had already participated, as a team, in the 2020 edition of SWERC , enabling École Polytechnique to win this competition for the first time.

“It’s a wonderful result. Warm congratulations to the team, Khanh Nguyen, Thanh Vinh Nguyen, and Louis Abraham! And special thanks to all people who support and made it possible”, said Dominique Rossin, vice-provost for Education.

The 2021 edition of the ICPC took place at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology from October 1st to October 6th and brought together 58,963 talented university students from 3,406 universities and 104 countries. Only the best teams qualified to advance to the finals. The previous time École Polytechnique qualified for the final was in 2003.

“Preparing for this edition of the ICPC World Finals was not easy, mainly due to the postponement of the competition by more than a year because of the Covid 19 crisis. The three competitors showed great determination: they trained together every week for two years, for about eight hours a week, and developed a perfect team collaboration, “said Hang Zhou, assistant professor at École Polytechnique who coached them alongside Nathanaël Courant, a PhD student at Inria.