Cyprus Programming Challenge 2026

The qualifying round opens on 7 November and runs for nine days online. The final is on 22 November in Pafos, and only thirty people get to sit it. The Cyprus Programming Challenge is a national coding olympiad for school students, organised by the Cyprus Computer Society, hosted by Neapolis University Pafos, and supported by the JetBrains Foundation and the Technology Leaders of the Future (TLF) programme with The Island Private School. Two rounds.

• Qualifying round — 7–15 November 2026, online, open to everyone who registers. Sat on Codeforces, with a Discord server alongside it. Joining instructions are emailed after registration.
• Final round — 22 November 2026, on campus at Neapolis University Pafos, TOP-30 only. Competitors bring their own laptop and are told to arrive by 12:00 to register. The published running order for the day is registration, a set-up and practice round, the contest itself, an intermission, and the awards ceremony, finishing at 16:30.

Note the field has been cut. The 2025 edition took the top 50 into the final; this year it is the top 30. The qualifying window has also moved earlier and shortened — 2025 ran 22–30 November with a 6 December final, so anyone working from last year's calendar will miss this one entirely. Who can enter. The rule as published is short: "You must be at least 13 years old and currently in secondary education to participate." That is the whole eligibility test — no school-type restriction, and unlike some of the island's other contests there are no separate gymnasium and lyceum leagues. It is a single track, sat and ranked individually. What you actually solve. Competitive-programming problems in the ICPC and olympiad tradition — algorithms and data structures under a clock, judged automatically. This is not a puzzle contest like Bebras: you write and submit real code. Who sets the problems. The head juror is Pavel Mavrin — ICPC World Champion 2004, IOI silver medallist 2002, now at JetBrains Academy, and the coach behind Neapolis University Pafos' first place at the Cyprus round of the Greek Collegiate Programming Contest in October. The organising committee is Prof. Savvas Chatzichristofis (Professor of AI and Head of the Department of Computer Science, NUP), Eleni Tsiakkouri (Cyprus Computer Society), and Natalia Kitaeva (Project Coordinator, JetBrains Academy). Prizes. The top three in the final round receive special prizes from TLF and the JetBrains Foundation. No cash values have been published. How to register. Through the JetBrains survey form: https://surveys.jetbrains.com/s3/Cyprus-Programming-Challenge. Questions go to nup@jetbrains.com. Where it sits. This is the third rung of the island's competitive-informatics ladder and the one that is easiest to miss, because it is the only one not listed on the Cyprus Computer Society's own competitions page. Bebras finds aptitude without code in December; the Cyprus Olympiad in Informatics selects the national team; this sits between them as a straight programming contest, and it feeds the same pipeline that has lately been bringing medals home from the Balkan, Junior Balkan and European Girls' informatics olympiads. Format and date notes: listed as online because the qualifying round — the stage open to all entrants — is fully online; the final round on 22 November is in person at Neapolis University Pafos. The start timestamp is the opening of the nine-day qualifying window rather than a scheduled clock time. No registration deadline has been published this year — in 2025 it fell on the last day of the qualifier, so do not assume you can leave it late. The organisers have not attached an edition number to this year's contest; the 2025 edition was officially the 3rd. The landing page URL still carries a 2025 slug but the content has been updated in place to the 2026 dates.

Event website