Algorithm Competition Winter Camp 2020
The winter break is over, so is our annual Algorithm Competition Winter Camp, where we both welcomed new faces and reunited with the algorithm enthusiasts in our community. 301 students signed up for the 24-hour qualification round, out of them 201 participants sent a total of 3394 submissions.
We are proud to say that this camp proved to be our most diverse one as of this date; we had 52 students coming from 11 universities, and 27% our participants were women algorithm enthusiasts, who received a warm welcome from our algorithm community.
Offering an intense, ICPC-aligned experience, our Algorithm Team and coaches, Hasan Bal, Eren Altunoğlu, Orhan Uysal, Yasin Kaya, Kadir Emre Oto, Kayacan Vesek, Burak Buğrul, Ekrem Bal, reshaped the winter camp’s schedule according to the feedback we received at the end of the previous winter camp; this year we had two Foundation groups consisting of novice competitive programming enthusiasts, and an Expert group of invited 7 teams, whose members nailed at the qualification round with the highest scores.
Lasting from January 25 to February 1, the winter camp is traditionally held indoors due to weather conditions but the fun is always there; our enthusiasts did not only utilize their keyboards for studying, they also competed against each other in “Battle of Codes” to see who is the swiftest with their keyboard keys. The winner was Ziya Mukhtarov who proved to be the fastest coder of them all.
“It was an incredible experience, I think people gained insight about what does it mean to be competitive, and with this insight people got more motivated”, said Hıdır Yeşiltepe, one of the participants from the Middle East Technical University.
Starting the day with a practice of yoga is a tradition since our earlier days; as our community woke up to salute the sun at 8.00 sharp, we were happy to see that at the end of each camp, there seems to be an increased number of yoga participants!
We held an AMA session with our founder Tarık Yıldırım, another trademark of our camps, we keep an open dialogue with our participants so that they can have all the answers they wonder about; one of them being Yıldırım’s favorite movie: Blade Runner 2049.
Giving an ear to our algorithm community, this year we had another panel session with our Algorithm Team Lead, Burak Buğrul, and one of our coaches and former participants Uğur Uysal, where our algorithm enthusiasts got to learn about company interviews and the type of algorithm problems asked during them. Our coaches Hasan Bal and Orhan Uysal also took the microphone to tell their journey on finding the right internship.
55 kilograms of apples, 5 kilograms of coffee, and a week-long coding later, our algorithm enthusiasts were ready to sit on their computers to participate in the final contest; while the participants of our foundation group competed individually, the expert teams competed against each other in teams of 3, just like they would in the upcoming Turkish Programming Contest 2020.
Here are the top coders of inzva Algorithm Winter Camp!
Foundation Group
First Place went to Yiğit Soylu from the Middle East Technical University, who solved 6 problems out of 10. Berkay Demirtaş and Salih Bedirhan Eker from Boğaziçi University both solved 5 problems, and placed in the second and third place respectively. As everyone showed their utmost effort, it was hard to decide on who should wear the crown of Upsolving Winner, but in the end the title was Cem Kurulay’s.
Expert Group
We saw a reign of Bilkent University in this year’s Winter Camp as both first place Unagi, whose members solved 5 out of 8, and second place Tobiko, who solved 4 out of 8, as well as the Upsolving Winner, Ziya Mukhtarov came from Bilkent University.
During the camp, Experts solved 174 problems, meantime, our newcomer Foundation students solved a total of 563 problems, all participants of this camp are now a part of inzva algorithm community, and became inzva Algorithm Competition Winter Camp 2020 Alumni.
Hope to reunite in inzva Algorithm Competition Summer Camp 2020!
Do not forget the applications for Turkish Programming Contest 2020 will start during the first week of March!
A BEV Foundation project inzva is a non-profit hacker community organizing study and project groups as well as camps in the fields of AI and Algorithm; and gathering CS students, academics and professionals in Turkey.
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