Tasks at every stage
Last year, the tasks of the qualifying and final rounds were similar. Bachelor’s and Master’s students had to answer theory questions on mathematics and computer science under the eye of an online proctoring system and solve programming problems by submitting their algorithms.
Training for the Programming & IT track
One of last year’s track winners was Ilya Poduremennykh, a fourth-year Bachelor’s student at ITMO’s Information Technologies and Programming Faculty. According to him, the theoretical questions of the contest were no different than the Unified State Exam in informatics, while programming cases were at the level of coding competitions.
The student aced programming tasks and became the track’s winner in 2021. His prior experience of participating in such specialized contests helped him a lot, too. In 2019, Ilya was part of the team that represented ITMO at the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), the world’s largest and most prestigious competitive programming contest.
Ilya Poduremennykh and his teammates at ICPC 2019. Credit: news.icpc.global
“You should certainly look through demos from previous years because if you know which algorithm works in each case, you will be able to recreate a similar one at the contest, thus saving yourself a lot of time. Also get the hang of competition-level tasks, for instance, Codeforces lets you try your hand at solving various problems (from the less to the more complex ones) often created by other contest participants and major companies,” advises Ilya Poduremennykh.
The hardest part
During the contest, Ilya struggled most with the theoretical part because students had to take time to present all the used formulas, as well as calculate and check their results, and explain in detail everything they did along the way on camera. Apart from that, participants had to wait to learn whether they solved the tasks correctly or not. Practical tasks, in turn, run on servers, so students even have the chance to test their solutions first before submitting them. That makes the contest similar to ICPC.
Ilya Poduremennykh. Photo courtesy of the subject
Programming & IT is one of the three core tracks at the contest that are organized by ITMO in partnership with SberBank. Learn more about other tracks and their winners by reading our stories on Information & Cyber Security, Robotics, and Technological Entrepreneurship (in partnership with VeeRoute).
