ELTE's competitive programmers proved themselves in the world finals

The ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest) is the oldest and most prestigious university programming competition. This year, teams from 3,500 universities from more than 120 countries worldwide took part, with more than 70,000 participants.

The first round of the competition is the national ICPC Hungary competition, which was held on 14 October 2023 at two venues, the ELTE Faculty of Informatics and the University of Szeged. Out of 32 participating teams, ELTE teams won all the first 5 places.

The top three ELTE teams qualified for the ICPC CERC Central European Competition in December, where we finished 8th, 15th and 28th, winning a bronze medal and our best team qualified for the European Division Final.

The ICPC European Championship was held in Prague from 22 to 24 March, with 52 of the best university teams taking part. As a result of months of preparation, ELTE finished in 4th place and won the bronze medal, ahead of several renowned Western European universities. The members of the team were Péter Gyimesi, Áron Noszály and Péter Varga. With this outstanding result, a Hungarian team received an invitation to the world finals for the first time in the history of the ICPC competition.

In the final in Kazakhstan, the ELTE team (Áron Noszály was substituted by Benedek Nádor due to illness) came 24th out of 141 teams, ahead of universities such as École Normale Supérieure de Paris, University of Cambridge and ITMO University of St Petersburg. The team repeated its previous performance and finished 4th in the European Division.

Meanwhile, the 4th place team of the ICPC Hungary competition (Dániel Bertalan, András Csertán and Péter Szente) represented ELTE at the Sapientia ECN International Programming Team Competition for universities in the Carpathian Basin. The team won the absolute first place, solving more problems than anyone else.

In the programming competitions, students can compete in teams of 3 and have to solve programming problems of varying difficulty based on real-world problems using a single computer for 5 hours. The tasks, put together by scientific committees, primarily test the competitors' algorithmic and logical skills, but the conditions also require cooperation, creativity, innovation and the ability to perform under pressure.

The ELTE teams were coached by faculty members from the Faculty of Informatics, Zsolt Németh, assistant professor, and László Nikházy, PhD student.

The participation of the University was supported by the Ministry of Culture and Innovation and the National Talent Programme NTP-NTMV-23.