The IIT-A Team has advanced to the World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest in May in Thailand. Andrei Dumitru (CS 2nd year), Benjamin Grimmer (CS 4th year), and Todor Markov (AMAT 4th year) will compete in Thailand against 127 other teams, “the best of the great universities from six continents,” as contest sponsors put it. Teams will get eight or more complex, real-world problems to solve in five hours. They must rank the difficulty of each problem, determine the requirements, design test beds, and build a software solution under the watch of the judges.

The IIT-A Team secured a spot in the World Finals by finishing third in the Mid-Central Regional competition last fall, according to their coach Gruia Calinescu, associate professor of computer science. The IIT-B Team, consisting of Jia Hao He (CS 4th year), Calin Segarceanu (CS 2nd year), and Adam Sumner (ECE 4th year), also did well, solving five problems and finishing 21st out of almost 150 teams, Calinescu added.

The ACM ICPC competition is run by ACM, sponsored by IBM and headquartered at Baylor University. It is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming competition in the world. This year, 40,266 contestants from 2,736 universities in 102 countries competed in regional competitions.

Students who would like to participate next year should contact Calinescu. You must have been born in 1993 or later and have started secondary studies no earlier than 2012.