The University of Trento once again a leading player in the field of competitive programming. The UniTrento Hub, coordinated by Alberto Montresor, full professor at DISI, won the University Student's League of the Reply Code Challenge 2022, a programming competition organized by the Italian company Reply, showing once again to be at the top in Italy in the fields of information technology and problem solving.
The Reply Code Challenge is dedicated to university students and professionals and poses a real engineering problem to solve. The participants choose their team and the programming language. The basic challenge goal is to promote IT skills and identify young talents in this sector. The topic of this year focuses on scheduling problem that requires assigning a set of activities to a group of performers, in respecting a large number of constraints.
Over 560 teams joined the competition held on 10 March, with a strong Italian presence but also with many foreign teams. For the first time, Reply has drawn up a university ranking: out of over 200 participating universities, UniTrento ranked first with 1.16 billion points, followed by the Politecnico of Milano (0.74 billion) and the Politecnico of Turin (0.70 billion). The ranking continues with the universities of Bologna, Padua, Bergamo, Milan-Bicocca, Pisa, Munich and Delhi.
Alberto Montresor comments: «Beyond the individual positions, it is important to underline the great choral result of our University. Our goal is not to be the best team in the world; on the contrary, we want to show both the excellent background of all our students and their desire and ability to engage in a direct challenge. I cannot describe the feeling you get by thinking about your students that are used to facing and solving problems for an exam and now they do it for intellectual enjoyment only."
In addition to the honor of being top rated in a highly competitive challenge, the University of Trento will receive as a prize a Cabinet Arcade video game that will be used at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science.