FAU Wintercontest 2018 Results

The FAU Wintercontest organized by the ICPC team from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg has become an integral part of our programming contest calendar and is certainly one of the highlights. Similar to previous years, all problems in the contest were themed. While the problems of the FAU Wintercontest 2016 treated various aspects of the Star Wars sage, the 2017 contest was all about cats. This year the authors decided to take the contestants on a trip around the world. The start of this journey was Scotland, where the participating teams had to find attracting unicorns with either supernatural or miraculous attributes. Other stops included the conduction of botanical experiments in the Antartica, playing casino games in Las Vegas, clearing the streets of a village in Ecuador from volcano ashes, and simulating the last-gecko-standing game in zero gravity on the ISS. As one can tell, not only the algorithmic content of the problems but also the stories themselves were a true delight for all contestants.

In total 87 teams from 9 different institutions participated at 7 contest sites all over Germany. Our contest site in Munich hosted 35 teams that were composed of 87 contestants in total. While 32 out of the 35 teams were from TUM, we also welcomed two teams from the Frankfurt University of Applied Science and one team from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München to our contest area. The winner of this year's FAU Wintercontest was team "<(OvO)>" from Saarland University which was the only team that managed to solve all 13 problems of the contest. The best team from TUM was team "quanTUM" on the 5th rank having solved 11 problems in total. In general the TUM teams showed a remarkable performance considering that 4 among the top 10 teams (and 9 among the top 20) came from our university.

It should also be mentioned that this year's Wintercontest was by far the largest of all times. The number of participating teams grew by more than 35%. If the general interest in programming contest increases in this manner, our computer lab in Garching will soon reach its capacity. We really hope tough that we can still manage to fit all interested teams in our computer lab for the German Collegiate Programming Contest which takes place later this year.

Last but not least, we want to thank once again our colleagues at FAU for the great contest organization!

Results

Photos