ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest

Competition Overview

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.

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 is organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and consists of two tiers: a regional contest 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 10 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 scholarships.

The UW-Madison teams meet during the school sessions at least weekly from September through March. Our current and past training pages illustrate best how we prepare for the competition. We usually take three or four teams to the regional contest. Since we started participating in 2001, we have always been able to advance to the world finals. See the Hall of Fame for more about our achievements.

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.