International Collegiate Programming Contest

Welcome to the home page of the UW-Madison teams for the programming contest! This page provides a short introduction to the competition as well as links to further information.

Competition Overview

The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is a yearly computer programming competition for undergraduates and first-year graduate students from all over the world. It consists of several tiers: a regional contest, the North America Championship, and the world finals. In each contest, three-person teams get five hours to solve as many problems as they can from a given problem set on one computer. Each problem set has historically had 8 to 13 problems, which tend to be applicable to real-world situations with solutions that are intended to use a wide variety of algorithms. The top finishing teams receive some form of scholarship.

The UW-Madison teams meet during the school sessions at least weekly. Our current and past training pages illustrate best how we prepare for the competition. We usually take three to five teams to the regional contest. Since we started participating in 2001, we have always been able to advance to the next level and we hold the North American record for advancing to the world finals 21 years in a row! Our best performance at the world finals to date is a silver medal in 2024. See our Hall of Fame for more about our achievements over the years.

The links page will help you become more familiar with and prepared for the contest. You may also contact Prof. Van Melkebeek for further information.

Mailing List

Information about ICPC training sessions is sent to the icpc-team@cs.wisc.edu mailing list. Here are instructions on how to subscribe to and unsubscribe from the list.