NWERC 2017 Tryouts

Last weekend a group of 11 TUM students gathered at the computer science department in Garching to participate in the official TUM tryouts for the Northwestern Europe Regional Contest (NWERC). While the German Collegiate Programming Contest (GCPC) is the official subregional contest of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), the NWERC represents the next higher level for the Northwestern European region.

This year the NWERC is going to take place in Bath (UK) on November 25-26th. Each university from the Northwestern European region may sent 2 teams to the NWERC. If there is enough space left, another third team from each university is admitted as well. In the past years this has always been the case but due to the increasing popularity of the ICPC, this might change in the future. (Hopefully not in this year.)

Invited to the TUM NWERC tryouts were the students whose teams scored best in the GCPC 2017 and who are still eligible to participate in this year’s NWERC. In order to determine how to set up the TUM teams, the students had to compete against one another in two individual and two group contests. Each of these four contests consisted of four programming problems and lasted two hours. On both Saturday and Sunday the individual contest took place in the morning, followed by a discussion of the problems. After the lunch break with pizza, coke, and snacks, students were assigned to teams and competed against one another in a group contest.

Even though the sun was shining and the sky was exceptionally blue, our students were very focused and dedicated to solve the programming exercises. Among others they had to find the perfect location for a candy store, calculate the length of a treehouse tour, and check if a triangular and rectangular skyscraper could be erected on swampy ground.

At the end of both days the teams for the NWERC 2017 were fixed. The TUM will be represented by the teams “TUMbling”, “Nwreckers”, and “Fisch Quadrat”. Good luck to all of them!

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