Irish Collegiate Programming Competition 2024 sets records and draws international attendance

2 Mar 2024

The Irish Collegiate Programming Competition (IrlCPC) is Ireland’s premier programming competition for third-level students, regularly attracting students from all around Ireland and the rest of Europe. This year, IrlCPC 2024 surpassed all previous records for attendance, with a combined total of 158 participants across both the junior and senior tracks! This year's competition was held at the Western Gateway Building at University College Cork (UCC) on the 2nd of March and was organised by the UCC ACM Student Chapter and Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics.

The main track is open to all registered full-time third-level students, from both Ireland and abroad. In fact, some of this year's winners are from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Bath! Collegiate students competed in 51 teams of 1-3 people for a grand total of 144 participants across twelve different institutions.  

This year’s IrlCPC also featured a Junior track which drew participants from the All Ireland Programming Olympiad (AIPO). The finalists from the AIPO were selected to participate in IrlCPC 2024, resulting in a total of 14 secondary school students from all over Ireland competing against each other for a place at the International Olympiad in Informatics 2024 (IOI 2024)! Some of the contestants also participated in UCC’s Munster Programming Training (MPT) this year. 

Both tracks had four hours to solve 7 questions which tested their problem-solving and programming skills. Participants in the Main track competed as teams, while the Junior track competed as individuals. All competitors used the same question set (created by Guillaume Escamocher and Andrea Visentin from Insight Centre for Data Analytics and Andrew Nash from Advance CRT) with the top positions being in contention for the majority of the competition.  

All of the main track prizes were generously sponsored by Cadence Design Systems, and the top three teams were presented their winnings by Steve Hollands from Cadence. After a tough competition, three teams made it to the podium:

• First place: OMG is that a Koishi Fumo?! From UCC (Fangda Zou, Lianganzi Wang, and Yijie Jin)
• Second place: View from the Top from UCC, University of Edinburgh, and University of Bath (Suneet Mahajan, Isaac Lee, and Ayushi Mahajan)
• Third place: Undefined from UCC (Paweł Popkiewicz, Liam Cotter, and Radek Zajíček)

Congratulations to the winners.

For the junior track, the prizes for the best four competitors were sponsored by Keelvar and the top four individuals were presented their awards by Ruth Bergin from

Keelvar.  

• First place: Piotr Stelmaszek
• Second place: Fionn Kimber O’Shea
• Third place: Yuan Li
• Fourth place: Shuyang Feng

All four winners of the Junior track have been invited to join Team Ireland at IOI 2024 in Egypt in September this year. In addition, three Junior track participants were also selected to participate in the European Girls’ Olympiad in Informatics in the Netherlands later this year. Massive congratulations to Beatrice Cesonyte, Lily Cahill, and Jenna Hayes for this achievement! This year’s Junior track performed exceedingly well. In fact, if both the Main and Junior tracks were on the same leaderboard the first and second-place winners for the Junior track would be in the top 5 highest scorers! 

We would like to give special thanks to Cadence Design Systems for sponsoring prizes for the Main track, and Keelvar for sponsoring the prizes for the Junior track. We would also like to thank Insight Centre for Data Analytics for sponsoring the event. We would like to thank the UCC School of Computer Science and Information Technology for providing the facilities for the event, and Helmut Simonis for taking fantastic pictures of the event. Finally, we would like to thank all of the volunteers and the UCC ACM Student Chapter members who helped to make this event the success it is. 

All pictures shown below are accredited to Helmut Simonis.

First Place Winners: OMG is that a Koishi Fumo?! From UCC (Fangda Zou, Lianganzi Wang, and Yijie Jin)

Second Place winners: View from the Top from UCC, University of Edinburgh, and University of Bath (Suneet Mahajan, Isaac Lee, and Ayushi Mahajan)

Third place winners: Undefined from UCC (Paweł Popkiewicz, Liam Cotter, and Radek Zajíček)