Gennady Korotkevich Wins Google Code Jam for the Second Time

In a nail-biting finale, ITMO University student and reigning champion Gennady Korotkevich once again won Google Code Jam, the most prestigious competition for coders. 2015 World Finals were held on August 14 at the search engine’s Seattle offices.

This is the third Google Code Jam for Gennady Korotkevich. He won it last year and made it into the finals the year before. This year, he returned to face off against top Jammers from Poland, Germany, the Philippines, South Africa and others. ITMO University student got 155 points, including 29 by resubmitting the correct solution in the last five minutes of the competition. He was awarded the $15,000 prize as well as the automatic qualification for 2016 Code Jam World Finals.

Second place went to rng..58 - Makoto Soejima of Japan while Bruce Merry from South Africa placed third. ITMO University was also represented by Pavel Mavrin and Boris Minaev, winners of ACM ICPC in 2004 and 2015 respectively, who also made it into the final and placed 10^th and 16^th respectively.

A week earlier, Mr. Korotkevich became a three-time champion of the world programming cup Yandex Algorithm. He is also a two-time champion of ACM ICPC (2013, 2015) as well as the winner of Facebook Hacker Cup, Russian Code Cup and Topcoder Open.

Google has been holding this international contest since 2003. Every year it attracts over 20,000 participants and the top 25 make it into the final. This year, Google also had a new contest – the first-ever Distributed Code Jam that is hold on August 15, the day after Code Jam 2015. It’s an algorithmic coding competition track similar to Google Code Jam, but in order to solve the problems you will be required to write code for a distributed environment. The competition will challenge distributed coding, latency reduction abilities, as well as algorithmic coding skills. This is the first global competition of its kind in the competitive programming world. ITMO University student Ilya Zban’, a bronze winner of VK Cup 2015, is scheduled to participate.