Silver Medal for TUM!
We would have loved to open this article with a series of photos showing our teams solving programming problems while being surrounded by Iceland's beautiful nature: glaciers, waterfalls, natural hot springs, volcanoes, and, of course, auroras. Unfortunately, Corona made this impossible so that you have to imagine yourself the unparalleled scenery.
Similar to the GCPC 2020, also the Northwestern Europe Regional Contest 2020 was postponed first in hope of conducting the contest onsite after the end of the pandemic. In the end, the NWERC took place fully virtually on March 28th, 2021. There were 120 teams from 13 different countries competing in the NWERC. While Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Great Britain, Ireland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Luxembourg had been part of the NWERC region already, this year also Lithuania was welcomed to the club.
TUM was represented by three teams: Dolores TUMbridge, Lord VolTUMort, and TumLE. Due to the NWERC medals of previous years, the goal was once again to secure a medal and, if possible, also qualify for the ICPC World Finals. All three teams showed a strong performance! Team Dolores TUMbridge, the winner of the GCPC 2020, managed to solve 10 out of 11 problems, thereby solving the same amount of problems as the winning team. Due to the higher penalty time, the team came in on an impressive 6th rank, securing another silver medal for TUM! Lord VolTUMort finished the contest with a strong result in the top 30. The team was ranked 28th with 8 problems solved. Our third team, TumLE finished the contest on rank 65 with 4 problems solved and leaving 45% of the other teams behind them.
The winner of the contest was team "Los Patrons" from the University of Oxford which solved 10 out of 11 problems within only 135 minutes of the contest. (We may disclose that a former student from TUM who also participated for our ICPC team in the past was a part of this team! Congrats!) The second place was awarded to team "CyanForces" from KTH and the third place to "while (false) break;" from Utrecht University. The best German team was "Let's Party: Home Alone" from KIT being ranked 4th at the end of the contest.
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