Imperial College was one of five universities hosting the first annual UK and Republic of Ireland Programming Contest (UKIEPC)

The UKIEPC event was held as a regional contest within the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). The ICPC program here at Imperial College was established in 2011 and is  is run by Christian Ledig an RA in the Department of Computing and supported by Andreas Schuh, Jaap Eldering and Stefan Pszczolkowski. 

The Department of Computing hosted 28 out of the 47 participating teams  and was thus a main contributor to the overall success of the first UKIEPC event. The teams were made up of mostly  Imperial students but nine of the teams were from six other universities. The furthest team, “Team Procrastination” coming from the University of Glasgow and team “Hot Pencil Coding” coming from the University of Edinburgh. The event was supported by the event-sponsor Palantir who generously funded both prizes and  refreshments.

The event required competing teams to solve up to a dozen algorithmic problems using computers without Internet access.

The contest finished after five hours with six teams of Imperial College students ranking in the top ten. Team "Robin" from the University of Bath came first, with Imperial teams Intrepid Crazy Lynxes, OlteniaForceONE and RoCo achieving second, third and fourth place respectively.

Our congratulations goes to these three teams who will now go forward to represent the Department of Computing in the upcoming North-western European Regional Contest (NWERC) held in Delft University in the  Netherlands in November.