After successful completion of the course, students are able to

• analyze programming problems efficiently and in depth,
• find and extract the required algorithmic patterns in the problems, and
• apply efficient programming techniques to create correct and well performing solutions.

Introduction to Programming Contests in General

Detailed Analysis of the ICPC Programming Contest

• type of problems
• problem formats (input and output)
• understanding and using the Online Judge
• current contests

Introduction to Commonly Needed Algorithms

• graph algorithms (BFS, DFS, Single Source Shortest Path)
• string matching algorithms
• number systems, Big Integer Programming
• sorting

 Programming Techniques

• dynamic programming
• backtracking
• branch-and-bound
• encodings

Selected Algorithms and Their Implementation

• Dijkstra
• Knuth-Morris-Pratt
• Bellman-Ford
• Kruskal’s Algorithm

Efficient Programming Techniques

• avoid syscalls
• write testable code
• efficient use of datatypes (width, packing)
• code inlining
• loop unrolling
• effizient data structures (hashes, adjacency lists vs. arrays, etc.)

In addition, the best teams will represent TU Wien at the “Central Europe Regional Contest” (CERC) of the ICPC programming contest.

• Programming exercises
• Solving problems of previous programming contests

ECTS breakdown

lectures: 10h (5x2h)
exercises: 6h (3x2h)
assignments: 35h (3x15h)
exam preparation: 14h
total: 75h = 3 ECTS

In the initial lecture, we will introduce the course. As spaces are limited, priority is given to students eligible for the ICPC contest. Currently, all registrations are provisional, anticipating that some students may ultimately not enroll. Consequently, we are not rejecting any applicants at this stage.

The students need to pass the exercise and the exam part of this course.

The exercise part consists of solving programming exercises in groups.

In the exam, the students will have to solve a programming problem on their own.

The course is primarily targeted to students that are eligible for representing TU Wien at the ICPC. Thus, participants should have finished less than 8 semesters (strictly smaller than 8).

The participaents are expected to have a certain knowledge of the following areas:

• a good knowledge of at least one of the following programming languages: C/C++, Java, Python
• operating systems
• compilers
• data structures
• graph theory
• Linux
• basic algorithms (e.g., quicksort)