ICPC Programming Competitions

Each year the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) sponsors the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Students work in teams of three to solve as many problems as possible in a five-hour time period. The available programming languages for the contest are C++ and Java, and (starting in 2016) Python. Saint Louis University can send up to nine students (three teams of three) to the regional competition. We'd like you to be one of them.

AY2018-2019 Dates

Contest History

Last year's contest involved 46,381 students from 2,948 universities in 103 countries, competing at 530 different regional sites. The top 133 teams in the world traveled to Beijing, China for the world finals. Here are the problems from last year's regionals and the more difficult problems from last year's finals. If you want to try these, or to try problems from past regionals, you may submit code online at the ICPC Live Archive and get immediate feedback.

Computational Problem Solving Course

There is opportunity to receive university credit for those interested in participating in the contest. In the fall, our department offers a course titled Computational Problem Solving (CSCI 2190). This course will serve to prepare students for the types of problems seen on the contest. (students are also welcome to participate without registering for this course).

The course is a 1-credit course using the Pass/No Pass grading option. Given the nature of the typical problems, participating students should generally have completed coursework through the level of CSCI 2100 (Data Structures) or equivalent. The regular meeting time for the course coincides with the practices for the programming contest team. For more information, please see the formal syllabus.

Additional Resources

For further information, contact Dr. Michael Goldwasser, the team coach.

Additional resources for our team