UBC Programming Team Wins 2016 ACM Regional Programming Competition

The UBC ACM programming team won first place at the 2016 ACM Pacific Northwest Regional Programming Competition, and will be advancing to the 2017 ACM World Finals. The teams faced tough competition, beating out teams from top schools including Stanford, Berkeley, and University of Washington. 

The competition is split into two divisions based on experience.  Division 1 teams are given more algorithmically challenging programming problems to solve than Division 2 teams.  Only teams from Division 1 are eligible to advance to the World Finals.

In Division 1, the UBC* team ranked 1st overall, ahead of teams from Berkeley and Stanford, and is the Canada Site Winner.  UBC* managed to solve each attempted problem in one try, without a single mistake.  This has not been achieved in any universities in the Pacific Northwest Region for the last six years.  UBC*  is one of four Canadian teams advancing to the World Finals (the others being UWaterloo, UT, and UAlberta).  All UBC teams in Division 1 were in the top 20 of over 70 teams.

In Division 2, teams UBC^ and UBC& got Silver and Bronze medals respectively (2nd and 3rd overall), finishing just behind Berkeley in a close competition. Of the top 5 teams in Division 2, three were from UBC.

According to coach Paul Liu, 'This result was only possible because of the dedication of our team members. Our teams train hard year-round, with some teams averaging 10-20 hours of practice a week. They are highly self-motivated and do it purely for the love of solving problems.' 

Coach Nasa Rouf concurred. 'We have a good sense of camaraderie and community among the contestants, coaches and alumni … All of us have contributed to our more or less consistent success over the years, and in particular winning the region this year.'

Here are the members of the winning teams:

Division 1:

UBC* (Canada Site winner, Gold Medal) - Daniel Du (CS2), Jason Chiu (Math/CS5), Lucca Siaudzionis (Business/CS1)

Division 2:

UBC^ (Silver Medal) - Henry Xia (Math1), Emmanuel Sales (CS2), Alfred Xing (CS4)

UBC& (Bronze Medal) - Shikib Mehri (CS4), Brandon Zhang (CS1), Albert Xing (CS4)

Congratulations to all UBC teams!