From December 27 to 29, 2024, the 2024 ACM-ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest Asia Region Finals (ICPC Asia-East Continent Final Contest, abbreviated as EC-Final) was held at Northwestern Polytechnical University.The EC-Final is the final competition in the Asia region, gathering the top teams that have advanced from regional contests throughout the season. It is a premier event in the ICPC. A total of 280 official teams participated in this contest, including teams from prestigious universities such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Zhejiang University. The "Village Guardians" team, comprising Luo Xinwei from Class 1, Computer Science 2021, Guo Tianzhuo from Remote Sensing 2022, and Shi Pingqiao from Class 1, Artificial Intelligence 2021, won the Honorable Mention award. This is the first time our university has advanced to and won an award in this event, marking a historic breakthrough.
The ACM-ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest, hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is recognized as the largest and most prestigious international computer science competition for university students worldwide. It is hailed as the Olympic competition in the field of computer software. Teams of three students compete, with each team using only one computer to solve over ten problems within five hours using any of the programming languages C, C++, or Java. The contest questions are all in English and cover a wide range of knowledge areas, including search, simulation, dynamic programming, greedy algorithms, data structures, graph theory, probability, number theory, combinatorial mathematics, computational geometry, and more.
With the strong leadership and support of the Academic Affairs Office and the School of Artificial Intelligence, our university's ACM training team has attracted programming enthusiasts from various majors across the campus. Guided by instructors such as Zhou Faguo, Liu Zhenhan, and Gao Wenchao from the Computer Science Department, the team organizes algorithm and programming skills training during weekends and summer and winter vacations. By integrating teaching and training, the team cultivates students' computational thinking, enhances their algorithm design and programming abilities, selects and discovers outstanding competitors, and provides important support for scientific research and innovation among our university students. Gradually, a teaching mode of promoting learning and teaching through competitions, and integrating competitions with teaching, has been formed.
