Polytechnique students perform at the International Collegiate Programming Contest

Held annually since 1977, the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is a computer programming competition for undergraduate and graduate students. In teams of three, students must solve a dozen problems in five hours, using a single computer. The aim is to solve as many problems as possible. In the event of a tie, speed is the tie-breaking criterion.

For the regional stage, the Southwestern European Regional Contest (SWERC) took place simultaneously in France (Lyon), Italy (Pisa) and Portugal (Lisbon), with 141 teams from six countries taking part.  École polytechnique sent 3 teams, Xeppelin (made up of Aleksei Arzhantsev, Dmitry Akulov, and Konstantin Amelichev, MScT master students), UXT and Xchb (made up respectively of Andrei-Robert Ion, Eliška Macáková, Luca Perju Verzotti and Alexandru Ardelean, Luca Metehau, Raul-Andrei Pop, first and second year Bachelor students).

Team Xeppelin came out on top with 10 problems solved, including two in the last 5 minutes.  It thus qualified for the European final in Porto, where it finished in 12th place with a bronze medal, and for the international final to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, from August 31 to September 5, 2025, where some 100 teams will be present.

A highly challenging competition

"It's a competition that's getting tougher and tougher. It's only the 2nd time X has won SWERC since 2019, and the 6th time the team has qualified for the final since 1977," explains Jill-Jenn Vie, a researcher at Inria and teacher in the Computer Science Department at École polytechnique who coaches the students with Simon Mauras. In preparation for the competition,  Jill-Jenn Vie teaches a dedicated course in advanced programming, the final exam of which serves as an internal selection process.

"The interest is in learning how to solve difficult problems, finding the right ways to get back to a known problem and implementing these algorithms without bugs in languages like C++ or Python, and above all, working as part of a team. This last point is rare in programming competitions."

The ICPC, for which a mention on the CV is appreciated by many tech companies, attracts students from the world's leading higher education institutions.