HSE University Students and Graduates Among Winners of VK Cup ‘22/23
On February 5, the finals and award ceremony of the VK Cup ‘22/23 IT championship took place. The competition comprised two qualifying stages and one final stage. There were more than 5,000 applications for the qualifying stages, with a total of 80 participants making it to the finals.
The VK Cup ‘22/23 was arranged using VK’s All Cups platform and Codeforces and was divided into five tracks:
Sports Programming (Engine)
Mobile Development
Go
Machine Learning (ML)
JavaScript (JS)
This year marked the first appearance of the Go track in the competition, which tasked participants with optimising the speed of code execution. Participants of the ML track had to improve recommendations on the VK social media platform. The goal of the JS track was to develop a web client for the Mail.ru email service, while the mobile track was dedicated to developing interactive elements for the Yandex Zen app.
The final of the Sports Programming track featured sixteen top programmers from across Russia. The winners in each category also received cash prizes of 300,000 roubles for first place, 250,000 roubles for second place, and 150,000 roubles for third place. The finalists had to solve six problems in three hours. The winners of the Engine track were two students and one graduate of the HSE University Faculty of Computer Science.
1st Place: Maxim Gorokhovsky, first-year student of the Master’s in Modern Computer Science.
2nd Place: Fyodor Romashov, first-year student of the Bachelor’s in Applied Mathematics and Information Science.
3rd Place: Ramazan Rakhmatullin, graduate of the Bachelor’s in Applied Mathematics and Information Science.
Maxim Gorokhovsky and Ramazan Rakhmatullin represented HSE University in the finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) in 2022, where they came ninth and won a bronze medal. Maxim Gorokhovsky and Fyodor Romashov will also be on the HSE University team for the 2023 ICPC finals.
Maxim Gorokhovsky
‘I have taken part in the VK Cup several times before, but the only other time I made it to the final was last year, when I came second. The problems here are a little simpler than those in the ICPC finals, but there is less time to solve them; only two of the sixteen finalists were able to solve them all.
It was certainly competitive and a lot of strong participants made it to the final. For the first half of the contest, I was pretty far from first place. The format of the competition is not very different from regular Codeforces rounds, and I plan to continue taking part in those, as well as in the next season of the VK Cup.’
Fyodor Romashov
‘I took part in the championship for the first time last year, when I was still at school, and unfortunately I didn’t make it to the final. The VK Cup ‘22/23 was held in the VK office, and the atmosphere was amazing: we were given a tour of the office and they made sure that everything was comfortable for the competition. The award ceremony was fun and the prizes were cool. The cash prizes also motivate you to take part.
I will definitely take part in future seasons of the championship if I have the chance.’
Ramazan Rakhmatullin
‘I came first in last year’s VK Cup. I hope to take part again, including in a team format. I am happy with coming third this year, as I lost to worthy opponents.’
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