On Jan. 19, the McLean Competitive Programming Club participated in the MIT Informatics Tournament, or M(IT)^2, a national competition hosted by MIT that draws the top high school and college competitive programmers from across the world each year. With over 1900 contestants, M(IT)^2 stands as one of the most prominent events on the club’s calendar, challenging teams with rigorous problems designed to test their algorithmic thinking, coding speed and teamwork skills.

Co-captain senior Eric Xue and sophomore Kalan Warusa earned an impressive No. 3 place finish.

“They test you on both your ability to untangle the solution to a problem and implement it with programming,” Xue said. “Kalan started seriously training competitive programming relatively recently and I’m really happy to see how quickly he improved.”

Xue and Warusa spent months preparing for the tournament, working through past competition problems and simulating timed contests to improve their speed and teamwork.

“Having experience in coding is very useful to solve competitive programming problems,” Xue said. “You need to develop your ability to create these ingenious solutions and also structure them in a way that you can, step by step, tell a computer how to perform it.”

Xue emphasized how collaboration was critical during the tournament. Their teamwork shone when tackling particularly challenging problems.

“For one of the problems, we had a potential solution that we struggled to prove,” Xue said. “In a single-person contest, you would have to take a gamble to get out of this situation. But since we had two people, we found a better way to approach it, and it eventually worked out.”

Looking ahead, the club is eager to build on this success at the prestigious tournament.

“We went in hoping to get on the leaderboard, which we achieved,” Xue said. “In the future, we definitely want to attend more competitions, get good rankings and have fun.”