How we organized the Ural rehearsal ACM ICPC WORLD FINALS

    Good day to all habrozhitel.
    In this article I will talk about what you can get if you infect several IT students from the Urals with the cool idea of ​​an international championship.


    It all started on a hot summer day somewhere in July 2012. Several students and Leonid Volkov (the same head of the opposition election commission and author of democracy 2.0, formerly the winner of ACM ICPC WORLD FINALS 2001) sat in the kitchen of a local IT company . By chance, we were talking about sports programming, about his problems in Yekaterinburg, about the fact that over the past 9 years, a team from Yekaterinburg has never missed the world championship final (and also about whether it is useful for developers at all or not and similar holivars, but the article is not about that).


    Now none of us remembers exactly what Leonid said, but the words “Cool competition”, “Russia-China”, “Push the strongest teams of the world face to face” clearly sounded there.
    It sounds somewhat scattered, especially for the uninitiated, so a little explanation.
    About what ACM ICPC can be read in detail here , but in short, this is a team competition in solving algorithmic problems for speed. There is a clear hierarchy of competitions from university championships to the World Finals, which, incidentally, will be held in St. Petersburg in 2013 .
    So in these same world championships over the past 15 years , the teams from Russia and China have most often won (there is still Poland, but more on that later).
    And the idea that was born was to push these teams in battle against each other: the best Russian teams against the best Chinese.
    How to identify the best? Take the top five teams from both countries at the World Finals and invite them to fight.
    Yes, it just so coincided that two months before the World Cup in Yekaterinburg, the annual open Urals Championship in sports programming takes place. Why not take it to the main site?

    ( Ural Championship 2012 )

    Looking ahead, I’ll say that we have pumped the Ural Championship itself: almost all the strongest teams of Russia will gather there, as well as teams of undefeated veterans who graduated from the university, which is called years ago.

    No sooner said than done. Work began to boil. Search for sponsors, contractors, organizers, volunteers, communication with Chinese teams (their sports programming is elevated to a very high rank, which we never dreamed of), task preparation ... Well, you know, all this endless work, invisible to participants.
    Of particular note is the search for a steep venue capable of hosting an international competition. Fortunately, they didn’t search for long: we have the Ural Federal University in our city, and it has a multi-level platform, code-named “Parquet”.

    In the photo you can see the parquet itself, which will accommodate participants, and balconies from which spectators, trainers, and, of course, countless headhunters can watch the event.


    Another subtle question: who will prepare the tasks for the competition? Russia? China? And if they merge? And if they don’t merge, how will they prove that they haven’t drained it? After all, helping your people is a holy thing! What to do?
    If you remember, I mentioned that Poland also became the absolute world champion in the last 10 years. Here we invited their team to prepare tasks.

    While we were doing all this, Yekaterinburg SUDDENLY became the likely city for the ACM ICPC World Finals 2014. The
    Great People drew attention to us here :)
    From that moment on, our event became doubly important: we had to prove that Yekaterinburg was ready to host the World Programming Championship, not to shame the honor, etc. etc. This situation had its pros and cons, but most importantly: the event took on a format and scale that the ACM ICPC in Russia has not had before (the World Cup in St. Petersburg will certainly be cooler, but we will be 3 months earlier).

    A detailed description of our work, pushing through barriers and jumping over obstacles we will describe in detail (the article will be entitled “A Thousand and One Reasons Why Nobody Wants to Organize an International Programming Championship”), but for now I’ll tell you what we have in “Total "

    Firstly, two days of competition:
    May 1, the Battle of the Giants between Russia and China (everything will be feng shui, we will hang the flags of the countries, we will put the five teams opposite each other, we will make a general score for each country).
    May 3 The Urals Open Championship for Sports Programming, where 73 (!!) teams will meet, including 20 teams participating in the World Cup in St. Petersburg, including the “giants” of Russia, China and Poland, as well as 11 veteran teams from Russia participating in finals and departed undefeated.

    Secondly, the organization of semi-local competitions at the level of the World Cup, on one steep venue.

    Thirdly, video broadcasting for all comers in two languages ​​at once ( Russian and English), with presenters, interviews and real sports commentators. The broadcast will take place only on May 3rd, but we will definitely show in it the most interesting fragments of the Giants Match.

    We made every effort to turn the spectacular competition of minds into a real show, and we really hope that we will succeed. In the end, we are not cool enough to allow ourselves to fail :)

    PS: Today is April 29, the day after tomorrow is already the first day of the Championship, we almost do not sleep, and there’s not enough time. Therefore, we really describe the details of the processes and difficulties in the article after we finish, but for now we invite everyone to watch the broadcast of the championship and wish us good luck.

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