CONFERENCE
Six UL teams represented Latvia in the quarter-finals. Two teams from the UL Faculty of Computing qualified for the semi-finals. The team “LUOO1” represented by Kārlis Seņko, Andrejs Kuzņecovs, and Ojārs Vilmārs Ratnieks, took the 3rd place by solving 11 tasks out of 13. The only advantage for the first and second place winners was the time needed to solve the tasks. Members of the other team “VAN” qualifying for the semi-finals: Nikita Larka, Vladislavs Kļevickis, and Artūrs Jānis Pētersons, solved eight tasks, ranking the 13th place in the competition.
“Like last year, the first two places in the quarter-finals were taken by the students from the Belarusian State University, which has already won several medals in the ACM-ICPC finals. 13 teams can qualify for the semi-finals this year (their number depends on the results of the previous year), and each university may be represented by no more than two teams. Results are determined by both - the number of the solved tasks and the time spent. Only 18 minutes before the finish our team “LUOO1” was the leader. But then the teams from the Belarusian State University managed to solve task 11 first, and pushed our team to the third place in total. The best Estonian team took the 17th place, and the best Lithuanian team - 20th.” Says Guntis Arnicāns, the UL team instructor, and Professor of the Faculty of Computing (FC).
ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is the oldest and the most prestigious of its kind. In the previous academic year, ACM ICPC brought together 32 thousand contestants from 2286 universities and 94 countries from all over the world. Interest towards this contest is growing every year. UL students have entered the finals twice. In 2012, the UL team reached the shared 18th place in the competition of 112 teams.
For further contests the team will be advised by Prof. Guntis Arnicāns and Jevgēnijs Vihrovs, master’s student at Faculty of Computing, who entered the finals twice and therefore is not eligible to actively participate in this competition.
The participation of UL students in ACM-ICPC is supported by JSC “Exigen Services Latvia” and Roberts Blumbergs, Latvian Honorary Consul in Illinois.
 took place in Minsk, on November 5, bringing together 58 teams from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus, and Russia (Kaliningrad Oblast). Two UL programming teams ranked 3rd and 13th place, and advanced to the semi-finals to take place in Russia, Saint Petersburg, on December 7. ){kind=link}