Next up for preview is the team from Ural Federal University, Dandelion.
Ural Federal University (formerly Ural State University) has a long tradition of participating in ACM-ICPC and conducting not only one of the NEERC subregionals, but also the Ural championship. For many World Finals teams, this is the last chance to test their skills against peers. This would be the 13th finals for Ural FU, but it may be the luckiest one. Let’s hope the team will add a gold medal to 3 bronze medals the university teams have won so far.
That’s because team Dandelion won Northeastern European Regional Contest this year. Let me remind you that the 4 last world champions were from NEERC, and they always won regionals before getting a championship title. They finished 8th in OpenCup standings (remember, many non ACM-ICPC eligible teams may participate in OpenCup, including tourist’s and Petr’s teams) and 4th in Ural Championship.
Their coach, Mikhail Rubinchik, is well known and a respected member of the competitive programming community. He also won an ACM-ICPC bronze medal in 2011. This would be his second finals as a coach.
Team’s line up consist of Nikita Sivukhin, IOI Gold medalist, Alexey Danilyuk, Codeforces Legendary Grand-master and Oleg Merkurev, ACM-ICPC World Finalist in 2014 and Legendary Grand-master as well. Team members had qualified for onsite finals of various contests lately, like VK Cup or CROC Championship. All three are experienced and skillful, let’s hope they would repeat their performance from this year NEERC, that’s all they need to achieve a great result this year!
