A blitz programming tournament took place on the sidelines of the Global Digital Forum. The competitors were students of specialised secondary-vocational institutions and universities, young people aged 17 – 20 from Russia and Cuba. The tournament was organised by MIPT; partners were Sber, GigaCode and GitVerse; technical partner – the Foncode platform.
The tournament’s main trophy went to Maksim Pervukhin, with Maksim Kochnev in second place and Aleksei Kokurin in third. The Audience Choice Award was given to Sofya Makoveeva—the only female participant to reach the semi-finals; all four winners study at Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod (NNSU).
The blitz tournament at the GDF used entry-level tasks. The intellectual duel lay in the contestants’ speed of coding: each programmer had to solve 10 easy problems in 10 minutes. The winner was whoever solved a task faster than the opponent. Every problem was used only once; if the score was tied after 10 minutes, extra time was added until the first task was solved. The tournament followed an Olympic knock-out system: the winner of each blitz advanced to the next round, the one who lost dropped out.
“We have long been involved in various contests and Olympiads. In my view it’s fun, engaging, exciting—and it helps learning, helps education. Everyone remembers Ilf and Petrov’s ‘The Twelve Chairs’, where a chess tournament was held. Today we have the same kind of simultaneous game, not only in chess but in programming. Each blitz lasts just ten minutes. The difficulty is that both participants tackle the same task; if one solves it, he scores a point and the opponent must switch to a new problem,” noted Aleksei Maleev, Director of the MIPT Centre for IT-Education Development.
The Russian team—students of Lobachevsky NNSU — took the lead from the very start. By the second round only Russian programmers remained in the running.
“That’s no surprise, because Nizhny Novgorod has a strong school of mathematics and programming. In 2021 the NNSU team won the ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest) world championship and became absolute world champion,” added Aleksei Maleev. “It is one more confirmation of the high level of the Nizhny Novgorod school.”
