Students of ITMO University’s Information Technologies and Programming Faculty Mikhail Perveev, Zakhar Yakovlev, and Nikita Golikov, all members of the university’s team SPb ITMO: pengzoo, solved 8 out of 12 tasks – same as all other silver medal winners (teams from Belarusian State University, St. Petersburg State University, and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology), but with less penalty time.
“We’re happy with the results. We accomplished our main goal – to get into the world finals – even though the contest didn’t start well for us: we lagged behind our competitors, including other ITMO teams, on the simple tasks. But we pulled together and completed a complicated geometry task just five minutes before the timer ran out. Now it’s time for us to start preparing for the finals,” says Nikita Golikov.
The team is coached by Andrey Stankevich, an associate professor at the Information Technologies and Programming Faculty, and Nikolay Budin, a gold winner of ICPC World Finals. For Nikolay, this was his first time at ICPC as a coach.
“This year I debuted not only as a team coach, but also as a jury member. So I was cheering for the team while also stressing over my tasks, hoping nothing would go amiss. Team pengzoo are great. Even though the contest wasn’t off to a good start for them, they managed to submit the solution to the ninth task right at the end, which is what got them into the silver category. Since the finals aren’t happening soon, there’s still time to prepare,” he comments.
Northern Eurasia Finals 2021 in St. Petersburg. Credit: vk.com/nercnews 
This year’s absolute winners at ICPC Northern Eurasia were team HSE: Undertrained+Overpressured from the Higher School of Economics; its members solved nine tasks. Detailed results for each team can be found here.
All in all, Northern Eurasia Finals 2021 brought together more than 220 teams. The contest took place in four countries and at five venues: in St. Petersburg, Barnaul, Minsk (Belarus), Almaty (Kazakhstan), and Yerevan (Armenia). In St. Petersburg, the event was held at Tinkoff Arena. The participants unlocked 10 out of 12 tasks and submitted more than 2,500 solutions.
According to the contest results, the following 10 teams will represent their universities at the world finals:
- HSE: Undertrained+Overpressured (Higher School of Economics)
- SPb SU: Team Chill It (St. Petersburg State University)
- SPb HSE: Lemon Tree (Higher School of Economics St. Petersburg)
- SPb ITMO: pengzoo (ITMO University)
- BelarusianSU: 2 (Belarusian State University)
- MIPT: Log-rank conjecture (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology)
- Moscow SU: NoNames (Moscow State University)
- Yerevan SU: 2813 (Yerevan State University)
- Ural FU: CheezeKEK (Ural Federal University)
- Innopolis: U Q (Innopolis University)
ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest) is the world’s largest and most prestigious programming contest, held annually for more than 40 years. Last year marked the first time that the world finals were held in Moscow; the contest involved teams from 42 countries, including 15 Russian teams. ITMO University’s team received one of the event’s gold medals. Earlier on, ITMO University earned the absolute world champion title seven times – a record that has not been achieved by any other university.
ITMO.NEWS editorial team
