Technical University of Denmark: DTU students win the Danish Championship in programming
Three students from DTU were clearly sharpest for programming, when they competed against students from all over the country at the Danish Championships in programming on Saturday.
The programming skills of Alice Ryhl, Simon Rumle Tarnow, and Alexander Thomsen Skovsende from the winning team ‘The floor is made of Java’ were actually so convincing that they solved one problem more than the other 72 Danish teams. After five hours of competition, they could be hailed as the new Danish champions.
“It is great to win the Danish Championships. In the last couple of years, DTU has not sent very many teams, but this year DTU’s three teams have performed well. We hope that we can inspire more students to become active in competitive programming so that DTU can send even more teams next year,” says Alice Ryhl.
In parallel with the Danish competition, all teams participated in a Nordic championship with 226 teams from the Nordics as well as Estonia and Lithuania, and here the DTU team placed in a nice 3rd place only surpassed by two Swedish teams.
Professor: Cool in tough competition
Inge Li Gørtz, professor of algorithmics at DTU Compute, knows the students from her teaching. She is very excited about the Danish championship:
“We hope that we can inspire more students to become active in competition programming so that DTU can send even more teams next year.”
Alice Ryhl, ‘The floor is made of Java’ and DTU Compute
“It’s super cool of our students because the competition is tough. There are also some incredibly talented students at the other universities.”
In November, DTU will participate in the Northern European Programming Championships (NWERC).
13 classic algorithm problems
The winning team was formed when Alice was looking for two students. Her former teammates had become too old to participate. However, it is experienced competitors, because the other two, like herself, have participated in the same or similar competitions before.
The team has prepared by solving problems together for the LilleKat event, which runs every second Friday in building 324 at DTU, Lyngby Campus.
In the competition, the teams were given 13 classic algorithm problems. According to the newly crowned Danish champions, the easiest task was the following: “Sonja has a list of knots that she must learn and a list of knots that she has learned (the two lists are not in the same order). What knots is Sonja missing? ”