Many happy students attended NCPC this year
The programming competition NCPC was conducted the weekend before last, and UiB was as usual one of the hosts. Vizrt was this year’s main sponsor of the Bergen hub, and they even sent their own team to compete.
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NCPC (Nordic Collegiate Programming Competition) was held the weekend before last, which meant that close to 50 informatics student and other programming enthusiasts came to the computer labs at Bergen High Technology Centre at 10 in the morning on a Saturday to solve problems, eat pizza and have a good time. A total of 19 teams participated from Bergen, out of which 15 consisted entirely of students from UiB, which is a steep increase from previous years. Comparatively, 9 student teams participated in 2017 while 8 student teams participated in 2016.
At the end of the competition, there were several feats to celebrate. The master students Olav Bakken, Øyvind Haarberg and Erik Tjøswold of the winning team in Bergen, “P = PSPACE”, got third place nationally. Equally impressive were the accomplishments of the second-best team in Bergen, “Algoholics”, a team with only bachelor students. The team members, Birk Tjelmeland, Hans-Christian Hamre and Amar Topalovic, ended on a sixth place nationally among all the participating teams and got the third place among the teams in Norway that are eligible for the next round of the competition.
Author of two of the problems in this year’s competition and main organizer of NCPC in Bergen, PhD candidate Torstein Strømme, is very happy with the results of the competition: “In addition to the high turnout, we are very pleased with the fact that every participating team managed to solve at least one problem each. We are also very happy with the fact that 17 of the teams solved two or more problems in the competition”.