BARC at NCPC 2026
BARC was represented both at the keyboards and on the jury at this year's Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest (NCPC).
On Saturday 3 October, 282 teams from across Northern Europe spent five hours on 13 problems at the Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest (NCPC 2026), an annual team-based programming competition aimed at university and college students from the Nordic and Baltic countries, and BARC was well represented at this event!
New Danish champions. Team 3 Little 3 Late from the University of Copenhagen are the 2026 Danish champions. They solved 10 problems and finished 5th overall, a big jump from 23rd place last year. The team is Thor Eriksen, Elias Lolck and Asbjørn Lind. Asbjørn recently join BARC as a PhD student under the supervision of Associate Professor Mikkel Abrahamsen working on computational geometry. The title of Danish Champion comes with 10,000 DKK from the sponsors Netcompany and Jobindex. It also earns the team a place at the Northwestern European Regional Contest (NWERC) in Karlsruhe, where they hope to improve on last year's NWERC result: bronze medals and 9th place.
Shuyi Yan hard at work; contestants receive a balloon for each solved problem.
A team of one. One place above them on the scoreboard was a team called random. That's another BARC PhD student, competing entirely on his own: Shuyi Yan. Shuyi joined BARC as an integrated PhD student in 2022 under Professor Mikkel Thorup. The Danish Championships are for students under the age of 25, but NCPC itself is open to everyone. Teams are normally three people sharing one computer, and Shuyi still solved 10 of the 13 problems alone. This isn't new for him: last year he won NCPC outright as team snowman, a two-person team with BARC's Hanwen Zhang. Hanwen, who also pursues his PhD at BARC with Mikkel Abrahamsen, is now at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for his stay abroad, so this year he couldn't participate.
"I'm happy I tried, but tackling 13 problems all alone was just too much," says Shuyi with a smile. Even so, he wouldn't let go of problem J, Judicious Journey, and kept working on it until he had it solved, after the contest was over.
On the other side of the table. "Problem J is a very, very nice problem," says BARC's Thore Husfeldt, who was on the NCPC jury that writes and tests the problems. "It's a kind of discounted shortest path: find the shortest route, but the cheapest k legs are free. I wish I could come up with such nice problems!"
The Copenhagen site for NCPC 2026 was at the IT University of Copenhagen.
His own contributions were at the easier end. "I like designing problems with a bit of bite in them that can still be solved without knowing the full algorithms toolbox. Oh, and the task description for my problem about dactylic hexameter is entirely set in dactylic hexameter. I had unreasonably much fun with that!"
Thore, who has previously been head of the scientific committee for the Baltic Olympiad in Informatics 2023 in Copenhagen, sees competitive programming as a natural fit for BARC. "It's very consistent with the skills we value here: problem solving, algorithmic thinking, good explanations, mathematics, systematic analysis, teamwork. It's great to see hundreds of students engage with this kind of mindset all over the Nordics and Baltics."
Congratulations to everyone who took part, and good luck to 3 Little 3 Late in Karlsruhe!