CPSSD Achieve First Place in Ireland at the UK/Ireland Intercollegiate Programming Competition

DCU first year CPSSD students, Conor and Darragh Griffin stormed to victory at this year's UK/Ireland Intercollegiate Programming Competition held in the School of Computing, DCU on Saturday 4th October, 2014. The twins finished first out of 10 other teams from Universities around the country including various undergraduate students from Trinity College, UCD and Maynooth and were placed a very respectful 15th out of 70 UK and Irish University teams. This is the first time DCU has been the Irish host site for the competition and great to get home success in it's first year of hosting.

Last year, another DCU CPSSD team won the Irish section of the UKIEPC competition (http://www.dcu.ie/news/2013/oct/s1013g.shtml) this further highlights the calibre of students coming into this new DCU undergraduate degree programme. Conor and Darragh Griffin are no stranger to competitive programming having competed in the second-level All-Ireland Programming Olympiad for the previous 2 years, with Conor winning a place on the Irish team to travel to the prestigious International Olympiad in Informatics (http://www.dcu.ie/news/2014/jun/s0614bb.shtml) in Taipei in July.

 full results can be found at: https://ukiepc14.kattis.com/standings

The UKIEPC is a practice competition for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) where teams of undergraduates have 5 hours to solve a set of ten programming problems. The same problemset is used at all sites and has both very easy and very difficult problems. Conor and Darragh would hope to go to the next stage of the ICPC in Sweden in November were they would compete against university teams from across northern Europe.