Today I’ve been made aware of an article written up by insight about the IrlCPC contest earlier this year. Delighted to see our teamname up in lights in the headline (although it needs be remarked that the full name is Big Bogger Boys 3: Bugaboo Busters), also in great spirits that the fada in my name was included! It’s always nice to visit Cork whenever these competitive programming events happen and to see everyone, although I’m sad to say I couldn’t stick around for long due to all the hostels being either fully booked or outrageously priced.

As someone from the northwest of the country, it’s hard to ignore how strange it is that basically every programming event of this kind takes place in UCC alone, a university which is 7 hours removed from my hometown via public transport. Stranger still, if there were to be one university hosting all of the events, it’s rather unintuitive that it wouldn’t be in Dublin. That isn’t to say that all of these events should take place in Dublin (Cork »» Dublin any day), but contests ought to be more spread around. There are basically ~10 people in the country who organise contests of this kind and every one of them is based in UCC. If contests are to be held in other universities, the universities in question will each need to build committees from the ground up, in which the members have some kind of authority to acquire funding for organising, advertising and hosting. As such I should probably be doing more here in Maynooth to get things off the ground, providing an oppurtunity for those outside of Munster to train for ICPC and IOI. To be honest I’m not quite sure where to start.

Everyone on the winning team in this year’s contest was a previous competitor in the AIPO, each of us having represented the country in the IOI. This is, if it needs to be said, not a coincidence; it may not even seem like a worthwhile observation until you note that nobody on the team studies computer science. This fact should be given special care: former AIPO competitors are outperforming CS students. To really hammer this point home, take a look at the junior division of the contest, where secondary school students compete individually. These students were givent the exact same problems and scoring as we were in the college division. If the scores from both contests were to be placed on the same scoreboard, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th spot would ALL be taken by the juniors.

The AIPO and other programmes like it are producing better computer scientists at age 18 than colleges are at age 23, despite the fact that the AIPO is basically free to partake in, while college education is infamously expensive. So every year the oldest AIPO competitors will enter university leagues ahead in computer science, the question becomes: what university will they enter? If it even needs to be said, they will obviously enroll in UCC for the most part. Every AIPO event is intermixed with advertising for the university, which is often providing the students free accomodation, meals, flights, and entertainment. If other universities want the best computer science students in Ireland, they will have to give them some kind of incentive. (Better yet, other universities have the oppurtunity to create the best computer science students, before they even enroll).

It’s not only computer science students who are bettered by these programmes. As I’ve already mentioned, the winning team in the national intercollegiate programming competition was composed of no CS students. Specifically there was Suneet Mahajan, who studies Data Science & Analytics, there was Ruadhán MacGiolla Phádraig, who studies engineering, and there was myself, who studies theoretical physics. What an oppurtunity it would be here at Maynooth, located at the center of the country, served by public transport, if we were to train these students ourselves, and to create a pathway for them to enroll here with the tools they need to succeed in their studies.

For the interested, there are so many oppurtunities available for students, about which they may have never been informed:

IrlCPC

Our national college programming contest, with its own junior division for secondary school students.

UKIEPC

Intercollegiate contest taking place with both british and irish teams. The winners of this contest may go on to compete in NWERC. This contest may also be entered by secondary school students.

NWERC

Northwestern europe regional contest, the winners of which may go on to compete in ICPC

ICPC

The canonical international college programming contest.

AIPO

Our national secondary school programming contest. The winners of this contest may go on to compete in the IOI and the EGOI.

EGOI

European girls secondary school programming contest.

IOI

The canonical international secondary school programming contest.

There are also variants of these contests for mathematics.