Exeter College student teams up with Merton students to secure third place in National Programming Contest
On 18 October 2025, I took part in the UK & Ireland Programming Contest 2025 (UKIEPC), part of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) series. Together, with two students from Merton College, and we achieved third place.
The UKIEPC is a contest where teams of three students are given five hours to solve 11 to 14 problems. Teams can submit their solutions to any problem during the contest by writing program code and submitting them to a website where the program code is checked against many hidden test cases for accuracy and efficiency.
Perhaps the two most interesting features of this contest are: being able to see the live scoreboard showing other teams’ results during the contest, and the restriction that each team can only use one computer (so at most one person can write code at a time). Therefore, performing well in this contest requires strategy.
At the start of the contest, our strategy was to simultaneously read through the problems and pick out the easiest ones to attempt, while keeping track of what problems other teams had solved (which would indicate that those problems were easier). This reduced our time penalty and allowed us to get the easy problems out of the way so that we had more time to think about the harder problems.
It was my first time participating in this contest, and it was a completely thrilling experience. I have a background doing Informatics Olympiad contests throughout my secondary school life, such as the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). However, the change in format from IOI to ICPC made the contest much more fast-paced and exciting. It was delightful for me to train with my teammates before the contest too: they often taught me new concepts I had not seen before.
The follow-up round to the UKIEPC is the Northwestern Europe Regional Contest (NWERC), taking place in Germany at the end of November, and I am absolutely looking forward to it.
