Posted: 26th November 2018

Three teams from the University of Oxford showed off their skills in a programming teamwork challenge on the weekend of 23-25 November, held in Eindhoven. The following teams competed in the Northwestern European Regional Contest (NWERC):

Team: Los Patrons, achieved second place, a gold medal, and have qualified to the World Finals, in Porto, Portugal, in April 2019.
Costin-Andrei Oncescu – St John’s College
Stefan Constantin-Buliga – Balliol College
Alex Tatomir – Jesus College
Coach: George Chichirim – Keble College

Team: 2 Brits and a Dutchman came in sixth place, winning a silver medal
Shaun Marshall – St John’s College
Basim Khajwal – New College
Arend Mellendijk – Balliol College
Coach: Toby Cathcart Burn – Pembroke College.

Team: Oxford Ji-geiko achieved ninth place, and a bronze medal:
Andrei-Costin Constantinescu – Balliol College
Leo Feng – Keble College
Vid Kocijan – St. Hugh’s College
Coach: George Chichirim – Keble College.

NWERC is an official regional contest in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. It draws students from colleges and universities throughout Belgium, Luxembourg, Great Britain, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Estonia and the Netherlands.

In the contest, teams of up to three students had to try and solve as many programming problems as possible from a given problem set, using only one computer. The goal of each participating team is to solve as many problems as possible within the five-hour time limit. Potential solutions are submitted and corrected by an automated judging system.  Around 120 teams took part this year.

The full scoreboard can be found here: http://www.nwerc.eu/scoreboard/public/

It’s not the first time an Oxford team has found success in the competition. In 2017 the Tractor_Specialists team – made up of Andrei-Costin Constantinescu, George Chichirim, and Tamio-Vesa Nakajima – took third place in the NWERC, and went on to compete in the finals held in Beijing.