- 04.10.2026 08:00
Over 100 Teams and 5 Hours to Solve Extremely Complex Tasks
On October 3, Tula State University served as a regional venue for the qualifying rounds of the Central Russia Student Programming Championship and the Central Region Team Programming Olympiad for School Students.
The Central Russia Championship constitutes the quarter-final stage of the ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest.
The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is the oldest and most prestigious global programming competition for university students, with a history spanning over half a century. Each year, around 70,000 students from across the globe participate in ICPC events. Winning or placing in the ICPC guarantees job offers from leading international and Russian IT companies.
Qualification for the ICPC finals follows a multi-stage process. Universities worldwide are grouped by region; quarter-finals are held first, followed by semi-finals. Tula State University competes in the quarter-finals within Russia's Central region.
Under ICPC rules, each team consists of exactly three students from the same university, sharing a single computer. Teams have five hours to solve—that is, to program solutions for—typically 10 to 12 complex algorithmic problems. Any available programming language (such as C++, Java, Python, or Kotlin) may be used. The winning team is the one that solves the greatest number of problems. In the event of a tie, the team that took the least amount of time to solve them wins.
TulSU was represented by eight student teams from the School of Competitive Programming. This year, the Tula teams are composed entirely of first- and second-year students from the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. Based on the qualification results, the top-performing teams will advance to the next stage: the Central Russia Championship.
Held concurrently with the university competition was the selection round for the Central Region Team Programming Olympiad for School Students. Two teams of Tula schoolchildren—students from the School of Competitive Programming’s Olympiad training groups—competed at the TulSU venue.
Both the university and school teams train under the guidance of Associate Professors Galina Valeryevna Basalova and Yuri Alexandrovich Basalov.
The teams advancing to the next stages will be announced shortly. In early November, several TulSU student teams will compete in the main round of the Central Russia Championship (ICPC Central Russia Regional Contest 2026), while the school teams will participate in the Central Region KOSHP at P.G. Demidov Yaroslavl State University.
We wish our teams confident coding, precise algorithms, and victory!
Photo by Marina Gavrilenko
