Saturday the 25 March saw the hugely successful return of the Irish Collegiate Programming Competition 2023 (Irl-CPC 2023). The competition was held in the Western Gateway Building at University College Cork and was co-organised by the UCC ACM Student Chapter and the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics.

The Irl-CPC is Ireland’s most prestigious computer programming competition, which attracts the best programmers from universities across Ireland, with occasional entrants from abroad. A junior track competition was also held for secondary school students. High achieving competitors from the junior track will also be invited to compete for a place to represent Ireland (Team Ireland) at the European Girls Olympiad in Informatics (EGOI 2023) and the International Programming Olympiad (IOI 2023). EGOI 2023 takes place 15 – 21 July 2023 in Lund Sweden and IOI 2023 will be held in Szeged, Hungary from 28 August to 4 September 2023.

The main competition welcomed 32 teams (three students per team) from nine different academic institutions to test their collective problem solving, numeracy and computer programming skills. There were also six secondary students in the junior track in a solo battle between themselves and going against their college counterparts using the same problem set.

After an intense day of competition with the main session running for five hours the winners of the college and junior track were as follows:

The intervarsity best programmers were:

• Bronze: Team LiGiMi, Dublin City University (Michael Cojocaru, Liam Collier and Giuseppe Esposito)
• Silver:  Team Infection, Dublin City University (Tu-Khiem Le, Van-Tu Ninh and Bunyarit Puangthamawathanakun)
• Gold: Team BigBoggerBoys3 (aka BugabooBusters), an inter-university group from University College Cork, Maynooth University and Dublin City University. Congratulations to Suneet Mahajan, Ruadhán MacGiolla Phádraig and Oisín Davey.

The winners in the junior section were:

• Bronze: Ayushi Mahajan – Christ King Secondary School, South Douglas Road, Cork
• Silver: Yuan Li – Sandford Park School, Ranelagh, Dublin 6
• Gold: Isaac Lee – Presentation Brothers College Cork

The competition would not have been possible without the support of the sponsors, Cadence Design Systems who were the main competition sponsor, Keelvar who provided support towards nourishment for the very long day and WebSell and EverVault.

Immense thanks goes to the volunteers on the day without whom the event could not have happened and who worked so hard to make the day such a success.