Thanks for playing. The contest is now over. Some links:
Congratulations to Shippensburg Blue for pulling out a victory!Thanks to Dr. Saunders ( saunders@cis.udel.edu) for writing one of the problems (flush royalty). And of course, thanks to you for participating.
If you're curious, the software I used to do the judging will be available soon (once I get it into some sort of release-like state...)
This stuff was added 2/24/00. It's some misc. information for the people participating. The other info can be found below.
Some important links:
On Saturday, February 26 2000, the University of Delaware Programming Team and the UD ACM student chapter will host a Internet Programming Contest. This contest will differ from the traditional programming contest, so make sure you read the Rules section.
The idea of an internet contest is that you write solutions using whatever environment is available at your school. You then send the submissions to the judges to have them look at it. Works like a regular programming contest, but you don't have to leave your school.
Submission and clarification scripts will be provided to you. They will be perl scripts, so you'll need a recent version of perl to run them with. The scripts can be found here
After the contest is over, all data the judges use, and all judge's solution programs will be made available. If, for some reason, you still have a question about something, you'll be able to email the judges.
The contest is free. To register, you need to tell me how many teams you have (email: breech@cis.udel.edu). Note that since this is an internet contest, we don't have to worry about space considerations. Enter as many teams as you want. If you do not yet know how many teams you have, you can just send me an estimate. I'm more concerned about knowing you're interested and will be bringing a few teams.
It may be the case that your school is relatively nearby another school participating in the contest. If the two schools want to `combine' into one site (ie, the teams from one school travels down to the other school), that's fine, but I need to know that you're doing it.
On the 26th, at about 12:30pm, have your teams send a message to
breech@cis.udel.edu. The message
should be sent from the account to be used during the contest, and should
include your school, the team name, and the names of each member on the team.
You'll get a response back telling you your team number to use for submissions.
Rules
We'll follow modified ACM contest rules. This is an internet contest, so you're allowed to use almost any internet resource you want. You may use calculators, books, program listings, web pages, stuff in your account, etc. You may NOT however, talk to anyone not on your team (including any electronic means of communication). In other words, the stuff you get from the 'net has to be static, and must have been posted prior to the start of the contest. You can't use IRC, ICQ, other chat rooms, or post questions about the problems on a mailing list. You can't talk to your professor/advisor about a problem, nor can you email your friend in Outer Mongolia about something in the contest. The only communication you may have is with the judges. Now, you may be thinking that there is no way for the judges to enforce these rules. Well, you're pretty much right. You're on your honor to follow the rules. The judges reserve the right to disqualify a team if there's proof of rule violation (ie, something like finding a post on a message board by one of the teams asking how to do one of the problems...)
Teams are 3 (or fewer) students. No more than 1 of those students can be a graduate student. If you have a grad, that grad cannot have completed more than 2 years of grad school and cannot hold a grad-level degree.
Teams may use up to 3 computers (no more than 1 per person). This is different than typical contests. However, note that the judges will only accept submissions from one email account! The account is the one your team registers with. A submission from another account for your team will be returned to you with a response saying "use the team account". It will not count as a failed submission though.
Decisions of the judges are final. If a mistake is found in the test data during the contest, the judges will do their best to correct the mistake and give credit for correct solutions. Once the contest is over, the final results will be posted.
Only C/C++ will be allowed for this contest (sorry. I don't want to deal with the headaches of different java versions. Perl's out because the contest would probably wind up being too easy to do in perl...)
A submission is exactly one source code file. Only submit source code. If you submit the compiled binary, you'll fail the submission.
The only external library that you can use is the math library. If your program requires another library the submission will fail.
All input comes from standard input. All output should be written to standard output. there will be no file io to worry about.
For each submission, a time-score is assigned. The time score is the number of minutes from the start of the contest to when your submission was received. If the judges deem your solution correct, the time score assigned to your solution is added to your overall score. For every incorrect solution on a problem, 20 minutes will be added to your score when you get the right answer. There is no score given for problems you do not get correct (so, if you submit something 20 times, but never get it right, there will be no penalty given to you for those 20 failures). The scoring is the same as the ACM contest (ie, the team with the most problems solved wins. If there's a tie, the team with the least total score wins). All time-scores are assigned based on when the judges receive your submission. Time stamps of when the message was sent will be ignored.
For every submission, the judges will send back a email response. The response will tell you if your submission was correct or incorrect. If incorrect, you'll also see one of the following responses:
The contest environment is whatever you use at your school. However, your solutions must run on the judges machine within 2 minutes. The judges will be using gcc/g++ to compile code (version 2.95.1). All compilations are done on a unix box, so I guarentee that any Micro$oft-specific code will fail.
I'm not sure how well the perl scripts will run under a non-UNIX OS. If you're running a non-UNIX OS, let me know (preferably ASAP) and I'll do what I can. I'm willing to work with you to get the scripts working on your platform.
I am aware that using email may not be the best solution for submissions. There are a few disadvantages in using it (and also in using the time the judges receive the message as the basis for the time score), but it was the solution with the least amount of extra headaches.
Other links: