The 2002 All-Ukrainian Programming Contest (ICPC quarterfinal)

On 11 September 2002, Vinnytsia State Technical University hosted the Ukrainian subregional quarterfinal of the ACM ICPC — officially "The 2002 All-Ukrainian Programming Contest." The field was almost entirely university teams; UPML, the Ukrainian Physics and Mathematics Lyceum, entered a team of school students as an exception, and I was one of the contestants on it.

Against a field of collegiate teams, the lyceum's team earned a Certificate of Achievement for an Honorable Mention — a respectable result for high schoolers competing outside their category. The organizers' own contest site listed example problems only as links out to external judges (acm.uva.es, acm.timus.ru, dl.gsu.unibel.by) rather than archiving the actual problem set, so no problem statements from this specific contest survive to reproduce here.

The quarterfinal was also a first taste of the ICPC pipeline that would define the next several years: within a year I was competing for Kyiv National University at the SEERC regional in Bucharest, the next stage up from events like this one.