The Técnico students António Neves, Pedro Bezerra da Costa and Rui Zhu Wang won a bronze medal at the Southwestern Europe Regional Contest (SWERC), a programming competition that brings together participants from Portugal, Israel, France, Italy, Malta, Spain, Switzerland, Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino and Vatican City. The Applied Mathematics and Computation undergraduate students were part of the team called “The Inlaws”, and reached the SWERC podium on January 27 and 28, at the Sorbonne Université, in Paris.

In this contest, the teams of three students try to solve as many problems as possible, such as optimising the path between two points or calculating the area of a polygon. To do this, they must create a program using one of the programming languages allowed – C, C++, Java, Kotlin or Python.

The teams are then ranked according to the number of problems they have solved correctly, with a gold medal being awarded to the first and second-placed teams, silver for the next four and bronze for the subsequent eight. “The Inlaws” ranked 12th among 107 teams and won a bronze medal. The team has qualified for the European final to be held in Prague, in March, where four teams will be selected for the world final.

According to the team’s coach Francisco Miguel Dionísio, a professor at Técnico, the students involved in this type of competition usually start in secondary school, through the “Olimpíadas Nacionais de Informática”. “Motivated by this initial experience, they continue their preparation enthusiastically and achieve results on a par with the best European teams”.