Software-Projektpraktikum SS2026 (B.Sc. Informatik)

Competitive Programming

Contents

This lab is offered to give you the option to train for participation in competitive programming contests like ICPC. You will be given hard problems (similar to ones in ICPC) to solve every week during a long meeting - sometimes alone, sometimes together in a team. This will give you experience in programming under pressure, since you will have very limited time for the problems. Therefore, you should expect stressful programming sessions (by design).

Material

• Our own judge server: DOMjudge
• The book Competitive Progamer's Handbook by Antti Laaksonen and its problem set
• The website Codeforces with many problems and (live) contests; perfect for training!
• Our own Docs

Requirements

Very good knowledge in some popular programming languages (like C, C++, Java) are required. This lab is not intended to learn a programming language, but to solve problems under time constraints in a team. You should like to work under pressure.

Organisational

We will meet regularly in person. We want you to train under authentic circumstances. Bring your own laptop configured with the programming environments for C++, Java and Python.
Note that participating in this lab course requires a registration on Supra in early January!

Grading

The grade will partially determined by your performance during the regular meetings, the reopened contests on our DomJudge and especially your partiicpation and performance on Codeforces. Solve 40 tasks and participate at 3 live contests on Codeforces at minimum! Remember that you should choose tasks that are challenging you, so that you can improve your skills. This means identifying your weaknesses and trying to solve tasks that need this skill or are have a higher difficulty than your previously solved tasks. At the end of the semester, we want you to confidently attend Div.2 contests.