Nexon has announced that registration for its newly revamped programming competition, the 'Nexon Young Programmers Cup' (hereafter referred to as NYPC), will open on the 4th. This year's competition has been completely overhauled to focus on strategy-based programming using AI, with the use of generative AI also officially permitted.

NYPC departs from its previous format of solving algorithmic problems. The competition's name has been updated from 'Nexon Youth Programming Challenge' to 'NYPC', and its new official slogan, 'Break, Solve, Win', sets the stage for programmers to showcase their skills. Significant changes have been made across the board, including the competition schedule, participation categories, track configurations, and award system.

This year's NYPC will feature two distinct tracks: the 'Rookie Track' for youths aged 14 to 18, and the 'Master Track' for university students aged 19 and above. The Rookie Track is an individual competition where participants design their own strategies for heuristic problems to achieve the highest score. The Master Track is a team-based event, pitting AI agents designed by each team against each other to test their ability to predict and counter opponents' strategies. The competition supports 12 programming languages, including C, C++, Python, and Java.

The competition will be divided into online preliminaries and an offline finals. To accommodate participants, the schedule is concentrated during the summer vacation period. The Master Track preliminaries will run from June 29th to July 8th, and the Rookie Track preliminaries from July 10th to July 19th. During these periods, participants can freely solve problems online. Top performers from each track will earn a spot in the offline finals, scheduled for August 29th.

Both the Rookie and Master Tracks will feature awards including Winner, Gold, Silver, and Bronze tiers, with a total prize pool of 50 million KRW across both tracks. The winner of each track will receive a commendation from the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism, along with awards from the President of the Korea Creative Content Agency, the Chairperson of the Game Culture Foundation, and the Chairperson of the Nexon Foundation. Furthermore, Master Track awardees will be offered the opportunity to participate in Nexon's experiential internship program, bridging their competition success with tangible career experience.

Notably, this year's NYPC Master Track will include Vietnamese students for the first time. Nexon has been promoting the competition through major universities in Vietnam, inviting top-performing teams from the online preliminaries to compete in Korea under identical conditions during the finals. This initiative aims to test the global scalability of NYPC's established competition management model. An official promotional video, featuring esports caster Jun-yong Jeon to convey the message of change, has also been released alongside the platform's launch.

Kim Jung-wook, Director of the Nexon Foundation, stated, "Through NYPC, we hope participants can grow by experiencing the process of designing their own strategies and finding optimal solutions while working alongside AI."

Registration for NYPC opens on June 4th.at the official NYPC website, where participants can register and attempt practice problems after signing up.