URJC's competitive programming wins the 'The 12 Grapes' tournament

URJC Competitive Programming

URJC students and teachers come first in their category in the 'Las 12 Uvas' tournament, organized by the UCM. In addition, the University teams sent to SWERC 2018 have improved their results significantly.

Raul Garcia Hemonnet

The Competitive Programming of the Rey Juan Carlos University has closed the past year 2018 in the best possible way. The ETSII student, Jakub Jan Luczyn, has achieved first place in the category 'Non-UCM Student of more than third year' in the tournament 'Las 12 Uvas' and the teacher, Sergio Pérez Pelo, also finished first in the category ' Postgraduate or Non-UCM Professor'.

For Jesús Sánchez-Oro, professor at the Department of Computer Science, Computer Architecture, Computer Languages and Systems, and Statistics and Operations Research and coordinator of Competitive Programming at URJC, the result “makes us very happy. Jakub solved all the problems in the stipulated time. In addition, we are satisfied because, although the idea of participating in this tournament came from the teachers, the students have taken it very seriously and have generated a positive dynamic”.

The '12 Grapes' event is organized by the Complutense University of Madrid. It takes place on the morning of December 31, and the different participants face 12 computer problems and have 30 minutes to solve each of them.

On the other hand, several URJC teams traveled to Paris in December to compete in the SWERC 2018 (SouthWestern Regional Contest) of Competitive Programming. This event brings together teams of programmers from universities in Spain, France, Portugal, Switzerland, Italy and Israel. As Jesús Sánchez-Oro tells it, “all the teams have improved. This shows that all the participants are trying to improve their abilities.”

The figures prove him right since, of a total of 89 teams competing in the contest, the URJC teams garnered the following positions: 'MilkTeam', 49; The Mas Debug, 58 and Lactose Overdose, 72.

In this tournament, the teams had 5 hours to solve some complex problems. The challenges were written in English and presented real-life situations that can be solved with algorithmic skills. These situations could be finding the shortest path from one point to another in a city or calculating the area of a polygon. To solve these problems, the teams had to write a program using the official programming languages of the contest.

The next challenge that awaits the URJC Competitive Programming teams is the 'Ada Byron' contest, which scores for SWERC 2019, in which they already played a great role in the last edition.

expectations exceeded

To prepare for these competitions and to improve programming skills, this Friday, January 18, the 20nd Edition of the Competitive Programming Course is launched. According to Jesús Sánchez-Oro, the call “is having a good response. We have exceeded all expectations since we expected 30 or 82 registrations and we are at XNUMX”.

The teacher points out that “we want this second edition to be more dynamic, with theoretical and practical sessions, in which the practices will be organized as a contest. At the beginning we will help the students to solve doubts, but our goal is that by the end of the course they will be autonomous and easily solve these exercises”.

You can follow all the news regarding Competitive Programming at the URJC through your account Twitter.