The 2010 ICPC Contest featured the second offering of the ICPC Challenge. In the weeks leading up to the finals, world finals teams were able to download the problem, upload their player code and compete with each other in preliminary matches. At the world finals, we ran a double elimination tournament to determine which teams had written the best players.
The 2010 ICPC Challenge problem was influenced by the February weather in Harbin, China; it was a game called IcyPC. Two players each control a group of four children in a snow-covered field. Player score points by building snowmen in strategic locations and by pelting members of the opposing team with snowballs. The game introduction video is an xvid-encoded file showing some of the basic moves in the game.
If you'd like to try out the 2010 ICPC Challenge problem yourself, the distribution binary is still available. It contains everything you need to try out the game and to get started writing a player of your own.
The following teams took the top four places in the final tournament.
| First Place | University of Canterbury |
| Second Place | Beijing Jiaotong University |
| Third Place | Instituto de Matemática e Estatística da Universidade de São Paulo |
| Fourth Place | Saratov State University |
The coding phase for the 2010 ICPC Challenge ran for two weeks in January. At the end of each day, we ran matches between the latest versions of submitted players. Each player was matched with three randomly selected opponents, and the following table reports the number of these matches won by each team. The rankings from these preliminary matches didn't directly contribute to the final results, but teams with a better ranking were given a bye in the first round of the tournament. Here's what they looked like at the end of the second-to-last coding day.
| Competitor | Win Count |
|---|---|
| University of Canterbury | 26 |
| Zhejiang University | 21 |
| Sharif University of Technology | 17 |
| Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology | 13 |
| Petrozavodsk State University | 13 |
| Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg | 12 |
| University of Tokyo | 9 |
| St. Petersburg State University | 8 |
| Novosibirsk State University | 7 |
| The University of Western Australia | 7 |
| Saratov State University | 6 |
| Shanghai Jiaotong University | 6 |
| Beijing Jiaotong University | 3 |
| Instituto de Matemática e Estatística da Universidade de São Paulo | 2 |
| University of Kentucky | 1 |
| University of Maryland | 0 |
| University of Rochester | 0 |