The university’s team Game of Nolife won Western European programming contest for students

In the finals in Thailand in spring 2016, the students from the University of Helsinki will face the best teams in the world.

The University of Helsinki has won the inter-university NWERC 2015 programming contest that was held in Linköping recently. It was attended by 95 teams from Western Europe. The Game of Nolife team from the University of Helsinki consisted of computer-science and maths students Tuukka Korhonen, Olli Hirviniemi and Otte Heinävaara.

-It feels great, especially since there were teams from strong universities like KTH in Stockholm, Oxford, and Cambridge, says Antti Laaksonen, the coach for the winning team.

The topic of the contest is the programming of algorithms, and the contestants have to solve a number of difficult programming problems. They are given five hours to solve them. Each team has one computer at their disposal for programming the algorithm.

The Game of Nolife team prepared for the November contest in Linköping with a training camp at the MIPT university in Moscow. The ten-day camp was organised right before the contest, and it helped the contestants especially with solving the geometric problems.

-The level of contest programming in Russia is very high, and the team had the opportunity to compete against some of the best Russian teams during the camp, Laaksonen says.

The finals will be held in Thailand in May 2016. The teams in the finals have won regionals around the world. The goal of Game of Nolife is to win a medal, which will require a lot of training during the spring.

Main page of the contest: http://www.nwerc.eu/

Results: http://www.nwerc.eu/scoreboard/

Image: The Game of Nolife team, left to right Otte Heinävaara, Tuukka Korhonen, and Olli Hirviniemi.

 

Image: Pauliina Pajunen

Text: Minna Meriläinen-Tenhu

Translation: Marina Kurtén

Created date

03.12.2015 - 15:49

Discovering Computational Creativity at the University of Helsinki

Computational creativity is a relatively new field among computational sciences, but it already has an active international community of academic researchers. A part of this international community is the Discovery Research Group, run by professor Hannu Toivonen at the University of Helsinki. The group is interested especially in linguistic creativity methods, including methods for the generation of poetry, word associations, humour, and text summarisation. But the group’s efforts have also included musical composition, a human-computer co-creation study and on-going work in pictorial metaphors.

Free-Form Gestures for Mobile Authentication

In the third research result of the month we report on the recent results in gesture-based authentication of users on mobile devices. We interview Assistant Professor Teemu Roos regarding the recent accepted scientific article in the top-tier ACM MobiSys 2014 conference.

 

Strategy seminar of the Department 2014

The strategy seminar for the Department of Computer Science was arranged at the Kisakallio sports institute in Lohja on 26-27 May 2014. In addition to the strategy work, the programme included meals and coffees, sports, and sauna baths. The high winds blew frisbees and canoes into the bushes. However, the water in Lake Lohjanjärvi was warm, some 20 degrees according to the skin thermometer.

Professor Maxime Crochemore conferred Doctor Honoris Causa

Professor Maxime Crochemore received the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa of University of Helsinki in a conferment ceremony of the Faculty of Philosophy in 23 May 2014.