The SBU competitive programming team consisting of Heorhii Ivanchyk, Greg Zborovsky, and Kenny Zhang was ranked 19th in the 2023 North American Championship (NAC). The University of Waterloo became the Champions followed by CMU! A total of 51 teams from all over North America advanced to NAC through 11 regional contests. SBU was ranked 2nd among teams from the Greater New York region (behind NYU, but ahead of Princeton, Yale, and Rutgers).

This year, North America had exactly 18 slots in the ICPC World Finals, and so unfortunately for us, SBU could not secure a spot in the World Finals. We missed by the narrowest of margins. Both NYU (ranked 18) and SBU solved the same number (7) of problems, but NYU advanced to the World Finals because of a slightly lower number of penalty points (NYU's 1203 vs. SBU's 1227).

The rank list is given below while a more detailed version can be found here. Photos from the contest, the problem set, and problems analyses are also available on the NAC website.

Here is a picture of our team at NAC! From left to right: Heorhii Ivanchyk (contestant), Tanzir Pial (co-coach), Greg Zborovsky (contestant), and Kenny Zhang (contestant). Co-coach Yimin Zhu also accompanied the team. More photos of the team are available on the CompProg website.

Executive members of the SBU Competitive Programming Club (CompProg), particularly, Club President Tanzir Pial, aided by Yimin Zhu and Shawn Mathew, made sure that our contestants received useful training and practice for the contests! Other executive members (Astra Kolomatskia, Jiarui Zhang, Zafar Ahmad, and Michael Wolf-Sonkin) also contributed in various ways. Endless thanks to them!

We would like to thank the SBU Computer Science Department (and the Department Chair Prof. Samir Das) for sponsoring our teams! Thanks to Andrew Solar-Grecko, Emily Brosnan, Kathy Germana, Christine Cesaria, and Michael Delgrosso of CS, and Chelsey Dollinger, Ann Gardner, and Jennifer McCauley of IACS for help at various stages of this process!

Special thanks to Professor Emeritus Theo Pavlidis for always taking a keen interest in our competitive programming teams, encouragement, and willingness to sponsor our team to NAC!

Rezaul A. Chowdhury
(Faculty Advisor, SBU Competitive Programming Club)
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
& Institute for Advanced Computational Science
Stony Brook University
Web: http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~rezaul/