Dolores TUMbridge wins GCPC 2020
This year's edition of the German Collegiate Programming Contest was different in various aspects. First of all, the contest did not take place during the summer time but in mid November. Second of all, students were not invited to university to compete onsite but had to stay at home and participate over the internet. Third of all - we know this was a huge bummer - we had to replace the delicious pizza, refreshing drinks, sweet snacks, beloved gadget prices, and colorful balloons with their virtual counterparts.
Despite these differences, some things also stayed the same: students participated in teams of up to three students, teams were allowed to use at most one compute for coding/debugging simultaneously, there were 13 fun coding problems, and our students performed remarkable!
In total, 68 teams representing 14 different institutions from all over Germany competed in the GCPC 2020. Out of the 68 teams, there were 11 from TUM. It is a great pleasure for us to announce that team "Dolores TUMbridge" won the GCPC 2020. While this team had solved 12 out of 13 problems already after 200 minutes, they waited until 6 minutes before contest end to submit their correct submission for the 13th problem. We are not sure whether it really took them that long to come up with a solution or whether they just wanted to make the contest as exciting as possible for everyone. Their closest rival was "Let's Party 2: Das Imperium schlägt zurück" from KIT having solved 12 out of 13 problems. The third rank was occupied by team "https://www.dudweiler-blog.de/" from Saarland university that managed to submit correct solutions for 11 problems.
Also the other TUM teams showed an impressive performance. Team "Lord VolTUMort" came in 6th with 10 problems solved. "Neville LongbotTUM" was ranked 12th when the contest ended, having solved 8 out of 13 problems. Last but not least, also team "typical beginner mistake" made the top 20 on rank 18 with 7 correct submissions. If you want to take a look at the problem statements and solution outlines or if you just want to conduct your own scoreboard analysis, have a look at the official GCPC 2020 website.
Bonus quest: Find the patronus of Dolores TUMbridge on the article's photo!