ICPC World Finals 2022 & 2023

After many years away, I finally set foot at the World Finals again. I was thrilled, but also more than a little reflective—the eager heart was still there, though the hands were perhaps less steady. Time is unforgiving. Twelve years had passed since my first World Finals, and seventeen since I first encountered programming.

This was not, strictly speaking, my first time working as a World Finals judge. I had also been a judge for the contest in Bangladesh the previous year—or two years earlier, depending on whether one uses the event year or the calendar. I simply had not gone in person. Given how excited I was, I certainly would have gone if I could. The obstacle was not entering Bangladesh, but returning to the United States. For people like me who were living in the United States on a visa, international travel could make the US visa far more troublesome than the visa for the destination, especially for Chinese citizens. I faced the same problem that one of my fellow interns had encountered when I went to London in 2018: if I left the United States, I had no valid visa with which to return.

The pandemic made matters worse. China had not yet fully reopened, and returning meant an uncertain period of quarantine. US work-visa applications were also frequently being sent for administrative processing. Even if everything went smoothly, a trip home could easily keep me out for at least a month. Add the contest itself, and I would have needed roughly six weeks away—hardly a practical amount of leave for someone with a full-time job.

Another possibility was to apply for a US visa in a nearby country, such as Canada or Mexico. What I found online at the time suggested that appointments in Canada were already being scheduled a year out, perhaps because so many people had arrived at the same idea. Mexico appeared to be about six months out, though people said that an appointment within three months—or even sooner—might occasionally appear if one was lucky. There was no way to know until after entering the booking system.

I decided to try my luck. Unfortunately, this particular lottery had an admission fee. First I had to complete all the forms; more importantly, I had to pay before I could even see the appointment calendar. Payment itself was awkward and appeared to require someone local, which seemed like an excellent opportunity to lose money to a stranger. I found someone online who claimed to specialize in making these payments and asked him to handle it. The payment went through quickly. At least that part was not a scam.

The appointment calendar, however, was hopeless. I checked every US consular post in Mexico that offered visa services. Not all of them would handle cases like mine; some served Mexican nationals but did not offer the relevant interviews to third-country applicants. Every location I could use was booked more than six months ahead, far too late for the contest.

I refreshed the page quietly for two weeks and made no progress. It seemed that the only realistic option was to pay a professional appointment hunter to run a tool around the clock and hope it caught a cancellation. At that point I gave up. I treated the application fee as a donation to the US embassy.

There was another status-related complication. My US green-card priority date was close to becoming current under Chart B, while Chart A was still roughly a year away. For readers fortunate enough not to know this system: a green-card application begins with a PD, or priority date. In simplified terms, Chart A determines when an immigrant visa number is available and the case can receive final approval; Chart B determines when an applicant may be allowed to file early. Whether Chart B can actually be used in a given month depends on whether USCIS designates Chart A or Chart B for filing. Chart B generally runs ahead of Chart A, sometimes by a considerable margin. Because it governs filing rather than final approval, it does not predict when the green card will arrive. The dates can also retrogress: a chart may jump forward, attract a wave of applications, and then stall or move backward.

The obvious question is what good Chart B does if Chart A is not current and the card cannot yet be approved. In theory, that is true. In practice, green-card processing takes a long time. I hear it is much faster now, but in our day it was entirely ordinary to wait a year or more between filing and receiving the card. Earlier periods had been slower still, and an unlucky case caught in a sluggish process could take two years.

An unavailable immigrant visa number prevents final approval when Chart A is not current, but it does not necessarily prevent every earlier stage of processing. If USCIS permits Chart B that month and one’s date is current under it, the application can be filed and USCIS can begin its work. Once most of that work is complete, the case may wait for Chart A. If the priority date later becomes current and all other requirements have been satisfied, approval may follow relatively quickly. That can be vastly faster than waiting for Chart A before filing at all. In my customary shorthand: file two days late, wait two years longer.

In my own case, Chart B was on the verge of reaching my priority date. If USCIS allowed Chart B and I otherwise qualified, I could have filed. Leaving the United States during that window might have interfered with filing at the time, forcing me to wait until I returned—the details become even more complicated, so I will spare everyone. If Chart B then retrogressed before I came back, I would have regretted the trip for a very long time.

After weighing all of this, I decided not to attend the 2022 event—the 2021 World Finals—in person. It was my first year preparing and reviewing problems for the World Finals, and the experience was intimidating. A submission had to include a solution, but when a problem was assigned to me, no solution was provided. I had to work everything out and only then compare answers blindly with the original author. If assignments were random, this effectively required every judge to be capable of solving every problem, which was quite a standard. Fortunately, I had spent the previous two years improving and had reached red on Codeforces; otherwise, I doubt I could have done it. Secrecy was exceptionally strict. Every email and file had to be encrypted, as though interception were always imminent. Sending an email felt like participating in an espionage drama.

I later drew a diagram for one of my problems. It was spectacularly ugly, but nobody seemed inclined to replace it as long as the resolution was adequate. I also tried to hide an Easter egg in another problem’s test data by drawing the seven elemental symbols from Genshin Impact. The data was eventually removed for being unnecessary, after someone mistook the symbols for Pokémon types.

Then came 2023. The contest was originally scheduled for November in Sharm El Sheikh—yes, it was not supposed to be in Luxor at all. Then came the events everyone knew about. After the Israel–Hamas war began on October 7, 2023, security conditions across the Middle East deteriorated rapidly. Sharm El Sheikh was not close to Gaza, but travel, safety, and flight arrangements for many participants were affected, and the November plan was ultimately cancelled. The date became “to be determined.”

It was not until January 19, 2024, that ICPC sent participants a new message confirming April 14–19, 2024. The email first described the new venue only as “a famous city on the Nile”; Luxor was confirmed later.

The organizers had developed an unfortunate talent for choosing Egyptian venues just before trouble arrived. The 2011 World Finals had originally been planned for Sharm El Sheikh from February 28 to March 4. About a month before the contest, on January 25, large anti-government demonstrations began in Egypt as part of what became known as the Egyptian Revolution and the wider Arab Spring. Cairo and other cities quickly saw severe unrest. By around February 1, the organizers had decided that Egypt could no longer host the event; the World Finals would be postponed and moved, with the place and date to be announced. It was eventually held in the United States.

Now a similar plot had returned. None of this was within the organizers’ control, of course, but their reputation on the forums for being unusually “gifted” at venue selection was firmly established. Many participants were angry. This was a competition, not an ordinary conference, and postponement could seriously affect a team’s form—especially for teams capable of contending for the title.

The pandemic had already delayed the World Finals by more than a year. To catch up, the 2022 and 2023 editions were going to be held together, and now both were postponed. The 2022 World Finals would take place in 2024. Some contestants in this “International Collegiate Programming Contest” had graduated and worked for two years; no one knew how long it had been since they qualified. Bring them back after all that time and ask them to compete—what could possibly go wrong?

The contestants needed somewhere to direct their frustration, and the organizers received all of it.

After overcoming every imaginable obstacle, the World Finals finally took place in Luxor in 2024.

I was eligible for a visa on arrival in Egypt, so entry was no longer the problem. By then I had also received my US green card, making the return trip straightforward. Luxor was still not especially easy to reach. The flights and connections took long enough to remind me that I was no longer built for endless travel days.

After entering Egypt, I had to connect in Cairo for Luxor. I had not expected the trip to deliver two unpleasant surprises before I even left Cairo. During this particular transfer, I somehow went through three separate security checks. Do not ask why I had left the terminal’s transfer route. I could have remained airside, but the signs confused me so thoroughly that I followed them straight out of the airport.

The three checks were a light screening at the terminal entrance, a more substantial one before the departure area after presenting a boarding pass, and another substantial screening assigned to the individual gate.

That final checkpoint was where the trouble began. A single officer was operating it and seemed to have considerable discretion. Absolute power, as the saying goes, has its risks; I had not expected to receive such a direct demonstration.

The officer asked me to open my suitcase. He pointed to my steam eye mask and asked what it was. I explained that it was a warming eye mask for relieving fatigue. He said it was not permitted. At first I did not understand the significance. It was an unfamiliar item, I thought, and perhaps he was simply being cautious.

He placed the eye mask to one side, then pointed to the case for my electric toothbrush. What was that? An electric toothbrush, I said. Not permitted. By now I was thoroughly confused. The toothbrush joined the eye mask.

Finally, he pointed to my Apple earphones. What were those? Obviously, earphones. Not permitted. He set those aside as well. I had no idea what he was trying to accomplish.

He apparently realized that I still had not understood, so he asked one more question. The moment he said it, everything became clear.

“Do you have money?”

Now I understood. In my view, this was no longer inspection but an open demand for a bribe. There was little I could realistically do. I reached into my pocket with what must have been an expression of belated comprehension. He immediately pressed my hand down and asked what I was doing, pushing both my hand and the money into my backpack on the table. Another moment of disbelief: he knew perfectly well that soliciting money was wrong. Was he trying to keep it out of view of the cameras?

I searched through the cash inside the bag and drew out a ten-pound note. He looked dissatisfied, said “no, no, no,” and indicated the hundred-pound note instead. What choice did I have? I handed it over. He smiled and said, “My friend, now everything is fine.” My earphones were suddenly fine and went back into the bag. The toothbrush and eye mask underwent the same miraculous transformation. Then he let me through.

I was badly shaken and wanted only to leave before anything else happened. I was fortunate that I had exchanged some US dollars for Egyptian pounds on arrival. What if I had carried no local cash? Could he simply point to my dollars, declare those “not permitted,” and take them? What exactly was I supposed to do?

Sitting near the gate, I searched online and found numerous accounts from travelers who said they had encountered similar situations at Egyptian airports. Many described being pressured for money by security personnel. I also found people claiming that solo travelers who appeared to have no assistance were easier targets. In an unfamiliar country, was I really going to demand a supervisor and begin an argument? There was no guarantee whom the supervisor would support, and I was not eager to discover how much worse the situation could become.

Nor did I appear to be the only person affected that day. While I was sitting there, I overheard two Chinese women nearby discussing how they had just had money demanded from them as well.

The experience was not finished. In an airport restroom, after I washed my hands, there was soap and paper available beside the sink. A man who appeared to be a cleaner held soap out to me; I declined. When I went to dry my hands, he offered me a packet of tissues, and without thinking I took two. As I tried to leave, he blocked the doorway and held out his hand for a tip. He said only one word—“tip”—and nothing else. I began to suspect, unfairly perhaps, that he had reserved his entire English vocabulary for this particular business model.

Once again, money was being demanded. What was I supposed to do—start a fight in an airport restroom?

By then, my impression of Egypt had fallen into its lowest category. I had seen a cynical travel joke online: if you never visit Egypt, you will regret it for life; if you do visit, you will spend a lifetime regretting that instead. After those two encounters, the joke suddenly felt uncomfortably apt.

I looked up some figures available online at the time. Some put the monthly salary of a full professor at an Egyptian university at around EGP 20,000—roughly US$400, or about one-sixth of what an ordinary PhD student might receive in the United States. Now consider a purely hypothetical calculation: if this security worker worked twenty days a month and managed to extract 100 pounds from only ten people a day, his additional income would exceed that professor’s salary. How is that remotely reasonable? Shouldn’t this be cracked down on?

The flight to Luxor was uneventful, thankfully. The organizers had arranged accommodation at what was billed as a “luxury resort” on the Nile. It fell some distance short of what I would normally picture under that label, but it was clear that the organizers and local hosts had provided quite respectable conditions with what was available.

The hotel stood directly beside the river, with views of the Nile at night.

As a resort, it even had its own zoo. One of that year’s contest problems happened to use a zoo as its setting, so we went there to take a photograph for the problem statement—not the photograph below.

The organizers’ rest-day excursion began with a boat ride on the Nile. It was, honestly, an excellent experience. Sitting in a small boat with a light breeze does not sound extraordinary in itself. Remembering that the water beneath us was the Nile, traditionally regarded as the world’s longest river, made it feel considerably more consequential.

We then visited the Karnak Temple Complex. It felt as though the mysterious scenery of a film had entered the real world, and that a mummy might emerge at any moment.

Outside the official itinerary, the judges found a little spare time and arranged a private tour to the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, and several nearby sites.

The sheer number of ancient sites in Egypt was remarkable.

Soon it was contest day. The broadcast set stood outdoors. It was atmospheric, though it also looked like an excellent place to meet a large number of mosquitoes.

The contest hall itself was a temporary structure. There may not have been a permanent venue anywhere in Egypt capable of holding two World Finals and more than 260 teams at once, so one had to be built. Imagine something like a gigantic, opaque, double-layered plastic greenhouse. The zones between the outer and middle layers belonged to staff and were inaccessible to contestants; inside the final layer was the enormous competition hall.

Whatever else one might say, the air conditioning was excellent. The hall remained impressively cool. Given the temperature outside, competing without it would have been deeply unpleasant.

The judges shared an office with the contest-system staff. “Office” understated its size; it resembled a university computer laboratory. The two groups traditionally seem to share a room because together they determine how the contest runs and how submissions are judged. If anything goes wrong, everyone needed for the discussion is close at hand.

The two World Finals used independent problem sets and numbering. Some problems appeared in both contests, but under separate identifiers, so looking at the other scoreboard did not reveal which problem corresponded to which. We had also thought carefully about selection. We wanted the problems unique to each contest to differ enough that the two champions could not be compared too directly. If the sets and contest trajectories had been nearly identical, and one champion finished a problem ahead of the other, spectators could easily have concluded that the winner on the “weaker” side had merely been fortunate that the strongest teams were elsewhere. Being mocked even after winning a World Finals would have made for a miserable experience.

As when I had attended as a coach, five hours sounded long in advance. In practice, one could stare at the scoreboard and discover that two hours had vanished. The contest passed remarkably quickly.

During the competition, I was invited to record a solution explanation for one problem. The video remains on the official World Finals YouTube channel.

Those five hours of judging were, ideally, very dull. Judges and problem authors do most of their work before the contest; if they suddenly have a great deal to do during it, something has gone wrong. Our most common task was receiving teams’ clarifications, debating English grammar, and eventually replying with no comment. The most entertaining clarification we received asked: “Every time I press 0 on my keyboard, the computer shuts down. Is there any hope?”

Fortunately, that had happened during the rehearsal the day before and had already been fixed. In the actual contest, the affected team would understandably have been raising every alarm available.

Finally, congratulations to Peking University for an extraordinary comeback and the championship. Their first solve of problem S at 276 minutes prompted the entire judge room to cheer. When they solved X at 292 minutes, the place erupted again—by “the place,” of course, I mean only the judge room. The on-site scoreboard was frozen, so the audience would see none of it until the reveal.

By comparison, the winner of the other World Finals felt almost anticlimactic to me. With problems of roughly similar difficulty, that champion finished one problem behind and appeared thoroughly overshadowed. The comparison we had hoped to avoid happened after all.

The closing and scoreboard-reveal ceremony was held in an open square before a temple more than 3,500 years old: the famous Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut on Luxor’s West Bank, built beneath the cliffs. The stage stood directly in front of the temple, turning the ancient structure and cliff face into a remarkable backdrop. We had visited during the day. At night, however, the foreground lighting was so bright that the background was barely visible to the eye and almost impossible to photograph. Dinner was served during the ceremony. That evening’s food looked rather like the contents of one enormous communal stew pot.

Unfortunately, we judges already knew the result and had already celebrated, so the reveal itself was rather uneventful. Asking contestants on stage to guess their ranking was also painfully awkward; their expressions suggested that they would gladly have disappeared from the broadcast. Peking University’s penalty time was high, so the dramatic uncertainty of their comeback ended while the silver-medal places were still being revealed. Once their ten problems carried them into first, they never came down.

The day after the contest, everyone went home. I flew directly back to the United States without considering a day in Cairo. I had travelled all the way to Egypt and never seen the pyramids, which remains a genuine regret.

I later heard that one of the American judges took a 3 a.m. flight to Cairo the following day, joined a day tour, and then boarded an 8 p.m. flight back to the United States. He was already sixty. I could only admire both the stamina and the willingness to subject himself to that schedule—and wonder why the same idea had never occurred to me.

That story changed the way I approached later trips. Whenever I found myself somewhere new, I began by asking whether I could fit in something extra simply because I was already there. Travel is, after all, a form of willingly chosen inconvenience. There is no need to lock every hour in advance; sometimes it is better to follow one’s mood and improvise.