Bulgarian Oxford University students Viktor Kojuharov and Radostin Chonev, together with their teammate Harris Lung from Hong Kong, won a historic gold medal at the prestigious International Olympiad in Programming for College Students (ICPC), the 46th edition of which took place from April 14 to 19 in Luxor , Egypt. The news was reported to Danibon by Startup Factory – Ruse.
These are the first gold medals ever won by Bulgarians in the annual competition for students, also known as the “Olympics” in the field of programming.
For Oxford, the achievement is the highest ever since the Olympics began in 1970. It is also the historic first gold medal for an English university in a student programming competition.
International Olympiad in Informatics (ICPC) is the oldest, largest and most prestigious competition in the world that attracts the best students studying computer science. They go through competitive regional qualifiers to reach the global final, where teams of three students compete to solve 11 complex algorithmic problems within 5 hours. Competitors work together on one computer. The teams that solve the most tasks with the fewest attempts and in the shortest time are declared the winners. Only the first 12 teams get medals, 4 of them are gold, 4 silver and 4 bronze.
Last year, more than 40,000 college students from 111 countries and 3,450 universities from around the world participated in the regional competitions. 124 teams from six continents qualified for the final in Egypt.
The gold medal won by Victor, Radostin and Harris from the University of Oxford placed the team in the outstanding first place in Europe for 2023. The success proved once again the leading position of the educational institution among European universities in the field of computer science, as well as the good foundation of training in competitive programming in our country.
Tags: Bulgarian students Oxford gold International Olympiad programming college students
