Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest 2026
03 Oct 2026 - E-building
10:00 - 17:00
The Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest (NCPC) is the Nordic Championships in Competitive programming in teams for university students. Both student teams and professional teams are welcome to participate.
Register for the contest at https://icpc.global/regionals/finder/Nordic. Pick Lund University as site. All team members need an account at https://icpc.global/ to register.
Last date to register is Wednesday the 30th of September.
Practice sessions
We host weekly training sessions for NCPC each Tuesday - have a look in the #progträningar channel on our discord server.
The 29th of September there will be a training contest at Voyado - one of our sponsors! If you wish to participate and eat some pizza at the same time, please sign up at https://careers.voyado.com/pages/code-night-september-29th!
Schedule
3rd of October
| Time | Place | |
|---|---|---|
| 10:00 - 10:30 | E:B | Last minute information |
| 11:00 - 16:00 | Contest rooms | The contest |
| 16:00 - 17:00 | E:B | Solution session & Prize ceremony |
This year your team participates from a single personal computer on site at LTH (please read the rules below).
Sponsors & Prizes
Huawei, Neo4j and Voyado are the sponsors of NCPC@LTH in 2026.
The top student team(s) will have the possibility to participate in the regional contest NWERC, which will take place the 27th-29th of November, this year hosted by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
About NCPC
NCPC is an annual 5 hour contest where your team is given 8-13 algorithmic problems to solve.
The problems vary greatly in difficulty, from beginner level to extremely hard.
Solve each problem by:
- Writing a program in one of the supported programming languages
- Test it locally on your computer with the sample test cases
- Submit it to the online judge system Kattis.
- Wait for the results on the secret test cases.
Kattis will tell you if your program:
- Was Correct (Accepted)
- Produced the wrong output (Wrong Answer)
- Ran too slow (Time Limit Exceeded)
- Crashed (Run Time Error)
If you submit a program which is not correct, but you later in the contest solve the problem, you receive 20 minutes of penalty time for the incorrect attempt.
At LTH this contest is used as the qualifier for the regional contest NWERC. The top student team(s) that are ICPC-eligible will advance to NWERC.
Rules
In short:
A team consists of 1 - 3 team members
How and where you may compete
- You may only use one computer.
- You participate on your own computer - at LTH.
- You may NOT use any additional electronic devices (such as mobile phones) to compete.
- You may bring printed material (such as books).
What you may and may not do during the contest
- You may NOT use the internet for anything other than accessing the contest page and documentation.
- You may NOT use a program using generative AI, such as Github Copilot or ChatGPT.
- You may use prewritten code, and other software available on your computer that doesn’t break the previous two rules.
- You may NOT communicate with anyone other than the contest organizers and your own team members.
Your team is ICPC-eligible (can compete in the student contest) if all team members fulfills the following criteria:
- Born in 2003 or later OR started studying at Lund University in 2022 or later.
- Is enrolled at Lund University.
If these criteria does not hold for all team members, your team can instead participate in the open contest.
The full rules can be found at the official NCPC 2026 website.
Tips
A great way to prepare for NCPC is to have a look at the problems from last year. Solve the problems ordered by how many people solved them during the contest - marked by green on the scoreboard.