Sixteen teams battled it out in the final round of the 2018 University Programming Marathon (UPM), with the top three places going to teams from the University of Ljubljana. All three groups comprised students from our Interdisciplinary Computer/Mathematics Programme (IŠRM), which is run jointly by FRI and the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics in Ljubljana. Congratulations to everyone involved.

A total of 178 programmers and 60 teams took part in this season’s competition. The 2018 UPM final took place on 13 October at the University of Maribor between the teams with the best results from the first three rounds. The final in Maribor featured 16 teams and 46 competitors – and the fact that a mere point separated first and third places made it a very interesting final indeed. You can see the official results here.

The top three teams overall were:

1^st place: Final Solution (Žan Knafelc, Tim Poštuvan and Žiga Željko)

2nd place: muzik.si (Luka Avbreht, Filip Koprivec and Samo Kralj)

3^rd place: Jam (Aljaž Eržen, Marko Rus and Žiga Vene)

The winners in each university were:

University of Ljubljana: Final Solution (Žan Knafelc, Tim Poštuvan and Žiga Željko)

University of Maribor: ASMx64 (Vid Keršič, Niko Uremović and Mitja Žalik)

University of Primorska: Migos (Arsen Matej Golubovikj, Igor Saveski and Predrag Zvezdakoski)

This year the final featured nine tasks to be completed in five hours. You can see the tasks on the judging system, to which 173 submissions were made in the course of the competition (70 correct solutions). Slides containing the solutions to the tasks and presented after the competition by Dr Tomaž Hočevar are available here.

The competition was officially closed and the results announced by Prof Borut Žalik (dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and president of ACM Slovenija), Gregor Smrekar (Celtra), Andreja Smole (Cosylab) and Andraž Tori (Zemanta). A few thoughts were offered at the end by Dr Gregor Jerše (head of the UPM competition) and Asst Prof Andrej Brodnik (chair of the competitions committee at ACM Slovenija).

Photographs of the competition can be viewed in the gallery on the ACM competitions (UPM) website.

(The photograph above shows two members of the winning team at the awards ceremony. Source: ACM UPM)