KTH beat MIT and Stanford
KTH have finally succeeded in winning a world championship medal again following four-year losing streak. After gold in 2004, silver in 2005 and this year’s bronze, KTH now has a medal in each denomination. The prestigious US seat of learning team was beaten in this year’s programming world championship.
The KTH team, comprising Lukáš Polácek, Ulf Lundström and Chen Xing, finally positioned themselves in 12th place and thus secured a bronze medal.
KTH began the competition quite well, but after 4 of the 5 hour long competition, the team had fallen to 27th place, 15 places and two problems from medal position.
However, the last hour proved to be successful. The KTH team submitted the two solutions it needed at the same time as most of the other teams including the winners Shanghai Jiaotong University – stood still.
The final breakthrough came through the solid persistency on the parts of Lukáš Polácek, Ulf Lundström and Chen Xing. The team rapidly sent in 8 versions of a probabilistic solution, where only the probabilities of different choices differed slightly, the fifth proved to be correct.
KTH beat both MIT and Stanford. How come?
“It doesn’t surprise me. We are constantly in top position and have performed very well in programming competitions for many years. Besides, KTH is very strong in computer science,” says Fredrik Niemelä, one of the KTH team’s two coaches and doctoral candidate at KTH.
What would the KTH team need to have done to achieve gold?
“If we had solved one more problem we would have done it. The winners solved 7 out of 11 problems, we managed 6 problems,” says Fredrik Niemelä.
As a small bonus KTH has now beaten all other universities at least once.
For more information, contact Fredrik Niemelä niemela@csc.kth.se or phone +46 (0) 73 377 83 05.
Peter Larsson