CERC 2025

Congratulations to the UW2 team: Jan Gwiazda, Stanisław Karpiejczyk, and Jerzy Olkowski, who won the gold medal, second place at this year's Central Europe Regional Contest! They thereby advanced to the world finals!

Huge applause to other teams from our Faculty, three of which won medals! Kudos to the supervisors and coaches!

Krzysztof Diks's wrote as always a few words, feel invited to read the details and see some photos.

On December 7 the 31st Central European Collegiate Programming Championship took place in Wrocław. Seventy 3-person teams representing the best universities educating computer scientists from Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Hungary participated in the competition. The two best teams from this competition, from different universities, advanced directly to the 50th anniversary finals of the ICPC Collegiate Programming Championship (2026 ICPC World Finals), which will be held next year. The location of the competition is not yet known, but due to the anniversary, next year's event is expected to be extraordinary. I am pleased to announce that among the top two teams was our UW2 team: Jan Gwiazda, Stanisław Karpiejczyk, and Jerzy Olkowski. The UW2 team solved 10 of the 12 problems prepared by the organizers, including task B (they were the only team to solve it). The team from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest won the 2025 Central European Academic Championship. The winners also solved 10 problems, but in a shorter time. Our other teams also performed very well. In Wrocław, four gold medals, four silver medals, and four bronze medals were awarded. Of the 12 medals, the UW teams took home 4. In addition to the gold medalist UW2, the medalists were:

·Silver medal, 6th place, 8 problems – UW6: Piotr Blinowski, Jakub Dziura, Dominik Wawszczak

·Silver medal, 8th place, 8 problems – UW1: Jeremi Hyska, Sylwia Sapkowska, Robert Soboński

·Bronze medal, 9th place, 8 problems – UW3: Jakub Pniewski, Kamil Szymczak, Hubert Wasilewski

The full ranking of the competition in Wrocław is available at https://ranking.cerc25.solve.edu.pl/. The championship in Wrocław also served as a qualifying round for the 3rd European Collegiate Programming Championship, which will be held in Warsaw on February 6-8, 2026. Thirteen top-ranked teams qualified from Wrocław for the competition in Warsaw, only one from each university. I invite those interested to watch the Warsaw championships live.

Our Faculty prepared 21 students and four coaches. Before the competition, our representatives participated in a five-day training camp and previously met at the Faculty for classes every Thursday. I would like to sincerely thank the entire coaching staff, especially Kamil Dębowski, Kacper Kluk, Mateusz Radecki, Marcin Smulewicz, Adam Sołtan, and Juliusz Straszyński.

Preparing for the competition, organizing the trips, designing and purchasing the team jerseys, and preparing the multimedia materials required a significant logistical and financial effort. All of this was, and always is, possible thanks to the collaborative work of MIMUW and the Foundation for Information Technology Development. Thanks are also well due to the institutions that have been supporting our teams since the summer – Huawei's Copernicus Research Center, based in Warsaw, and the outstanding Polish IT company Atende S.A. Huawei is a diamond, multi-regional sponsor of the qualifying rounds for the world finals, held on all inhabited continents. In November, Huawei organized the ICPC Challenge Championship in Shanghai, to which Polish teams were also invited, but due to a date-conflict with the Polish Championships, they were unable to travel to China. The guest of honor at the Shanghai event was Professor Jan Madey, thanks to whom UW teams have consistently advanced to the world finals since 1995. He was awarded the Nüwa Medal for his contribution to team programming competitions. In Chinese mythology, Nüwa is a powerful mother goddess and cultural heroine, considered the creator of humanity, who formed humans from clay and repaired the heavens using colored stones when the column supporting the sky cracked. At the conclusion of the event in Shanghai, Mr. Ren Zhengfei, founder of Huawei, arrived to share his reflections on the future of computer science with the participants and answer questions. For those interested, a transcript of the meeting with Mr. Ren can be found here.

Krzysztof Diks