For five hours on Thursday, 10 November 2022, hall 4 of the International Convention City Bashundhara was the quietest room in Dhaka. One hundred and thirty-seven teams from 69 countries, three students to a computer in blue T-shirts, worked through twelve problems while balloons, one per solved problem, sprouted beside the tables that were winning. When the results were read out at a quarter to nine that night, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had solved eleven and was champion of the 45th ICPC World Finals, the first ever held in South Asia.
The podium
- Gold: MIT (11 problems); Peking University (10); University of Tokyo (9); Seoul National University (9), which also drew first blood, solving a problem in 11 minutes.
- Silver: ETH Zurich; École Normale Supérieure de Paris; Carnegie Mellon University; University of Warsaw.
- Bronze: HSE University and St Petersburg State University of Russia; University of Oxford; VNU University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam.
How Bangladesh did
As host, Bangladesh fielded eight teams, the most it has ever sent. BUET finished 51st and Shahjalal University of Science and Technology 56th, each solving four problems. The other six, from AIUB, Jahangirnagar, North South, RUET, the University of Asia Pacific and Dhaka University, received honourable mentions. Against the schools above, whose students train for the finals the way athletes train for the Olympics, four problems is a respectable score; against the ambition of hosting, it is a reminder of how far the training culture has to go. Dhaka University had won the Dhaka regional in October to reach the next finals.
The event
The finals ran from 6 November, organised by the ICT Division and the Bangladesh Computer Council with the University of Asia Pacific as academic host, and drew about a thousand guests. "This is the first time the World Finals have been held in South Asia," planning minister M A Mannan said at the closing. ICT state minister Zunaid Ahmed Palak thanked the ICPC Foundation, whose president Bill Poucher thanked Bangladesh in return for "a successful competition". UAP's Qamrul Ahsan, who directed ICPC Dhaka, and BCC executive director Ranajit Kumar also spoke.
What stays behind
The trophy leaves with MIT, but the finals leave something too: a generation of Bangladeshi students who watched the best in the world from the stands, a proven venue and volunteer corps, and a benchmark. The gap between four problems and eleven is now a number the country's computer science departments have seen with their own eyes.
