Hello again.
This is Egor Kulikov and this year I will preview teams leading up to the ACM-ICPC World Finals in Phuket. I believe the teams I preview are the top contenders for the ACM-ICPC champion title. However, this year the field is very competitive and there are more than a dozen teams who can realistically win it all. So I will not place any percentage this year on my predictions, sorry 🙂
Let’s start with the team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT has a long history of success in their 20 World Finals, including 3 golds, 5 silvers, 3 bronzes and 6 titles of North American champions. Last year they were one successful submission away from getting gold, but ended up with bronze in the end.
This year’s team, MIT ZERO, will try to surpass this result. The team finished second in their regional, NENARC, behind their rivals from Harvard, and 3rd in the North American Invitational behind Harvard and Waterloo. Still, I have a hunch that when the dust will settle in Phuket they could beat both of these teams.
This is the fifth World Finals for their coach, Aleksandar Zlateski, whose IOI achievements are quite solid: silver and two bronze medals. The line up (Steven Hao, Brian Chen and Andrew He) is quite solid as well – all of them are “reds”, Steven has received both gold and silver medals on IOI, while Andrew has 2 golds and TCO semifinal to his name.
Let’s hope the transition from IOI to ACM-ICPC will be smooth for this team and we wish them best of luck!
