The UCF Programming Team placed first at the 2024 Southeast Regional Programming Contest held last week, besting more than 100 other teams. Their victory secures a spot at the North America Championship (NAC), which will be held in May 2025. Top teams from the NAC are invited to compete at the world finals.

UCF sent a total of seven teams to the competition, all with strong finishes. In addition to the first-place win, the other six teams placed third, fifth, sixth, 11th, 15th and 24th.

The winning team, UCF OrElse, comprises mechanical engineering master’s student Tyler Marks ’24, mathematics master’s student Andy Phan ’21 ’23MS and computer science undergraduate student Sachin Sivakumar.

Not only did the trio finish at the top of the leaderboard for the regional ahead of teams from Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Florida, they also came out on top in the larger North America South Division, placing ahead of teams from Johns Hopkins University, the University of Texas at Austin and Duke University.

UCF has placed in the top three of the Southeast Regional — the qualifying competition for the national contest for universities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina — for the last 42 years, underscoring its dominance in competitive programming. Their impressive track record brings the same publicity and recognition as it does for other college sports, says Ali Orooji, the UCF Programming Team’s faculty advisor and coach.

“There is really no difference between programming competitions and other sports such as football and basketball,” Orooji says. “Universities receive recognitions if they finish as the conference champion in football.”

One of the keys to the team’s success over the years lies in the strong sense of community among competitors and coaches, Marks says.

“Despite the competitive nature of the regional contest, [where] … only one team [advances] to NAC, we all want to see the other teams do well. Everyone is constantly teaching each other new ideas and discussing various problems and techniques they have seen,” Marks says. “This open discourse allows for team members to continue to get stronger at problem solving and has been a huge factor in my growth as a competitive programmer.”

Sivakumar says the strength of the programming team is one of the main reasons he decided to attend UCF.

“One of the main reasons I decided to go to UCF over other colleges was due to the programming team.” — Sachin Sivakumar, computer science major

“I think that our school takes this competition a lot more seriously than other schools in that we have organization and structure both in our teams and the way that we train for the contests,” Sivakumar says. “One of the main reasons I decided to go to UCF over other colleges was due to the programming team and the environment surrounding it.  I think this attitude is a feedback loop, since it draws in strong competitive programmers and also helps train up even stronger ones.”

Marks, Phan and Sivakumar also placed first in the Southeast Regional last year and competed in this past year’s NAC. Stunningly, they did not place high enough to earn a spot at the world finals.

Their coach, Arup Guha, says although the team was disappointed, they are taking the opportunity to analyze the reasons their teams tend to underperform at the NAC in comparison to how they compete at regional competitions.

“Our goal is to try our best to identify the likely causes of this and try our best to update our training and preparation so that our NAC results are consistent with how good our students actually are,” Guha says.

UCF programming teams have a rigorous training regimen. As a team, competitors commit to two five-hour practices on previous competition problems each week, including a discussion of what motivated their decisions on items such as the order they chose to solve the problems, who coded each problem and which problems required collaboration. Additionally, each team member hones their skills on CodeForces, which offers live two-hour competitions online, an avenue Guha likens to playing nine versus a full 18 holes of golf.

UCF OrElse will be given areas to work on specifically for the NAC based on their strengths and weaknesses, and on areas the coaches predict will be relevant to the competition.

“Our goal is to optimize these decisions for the competition we are preparing for,” Guha says. “In addition, since there are several months until NAC, there is time for the students on the team to learn some new material or focus on specific problem types.”

Marks says he still carries the disappointment of not making it to the world competition last year, blaming himself for mistakes made during last year’s NAC. He’s using that experience to motivate him for next year’s opportunity to qualify.

“We have discussed the NAC contest quite a bit since it happened, and have taken several actions to make sure that the same and other avoidable mistakes don’t occur this year,” Marks says. “We will continue to train with this in mind so that we can continue to build good habits and optimize our chances for success at this upcoming NAC.”