ACM ICPC

Programming competition

Rules

• More than one team for a university can go to regionals
• Each team consists of 3 students
• Students must be enrolled at least part time in degree program at sponsoring institution
• Each team can only use one computer
• <5 years university experience before contest
• Eligible if participated in < 2 World Finals and 5 regionals
• Contestants may submit a claim of ambiguity or error in a problem statement by submitting a clarification request to a judge
• No printed materials or electronic devices may be brought in work area.
• Online references are made available
• Each team is permitted PDF of 25 pages of notes within limits described by Team Certification
• To qualify for finals, students must be registered in ICPC Registration System BEFORE competing in a regional event that advances teams to the World Finals

5 hours

8-11 questions
c, c++, Java

testing

• 8 questions for regionals
• 10 questions for finals
• Programs run on test data
• Each run is accepted or rejected by a judge
• If program gives wrong answer, team is notified and they can submit another program

scoring

• Team who solves the most problems correctly

• Placement of teams determined by the sum of the elapsed times at each point that they submitted correct solutions

• 20 minutes added for each rejected submission of a problem ultimately solved

timeline

• Regionals held from September-November of each year
• Winning teams progress to finals (next Spring to Summer)
• Faculty member must serve as team coach
  • Certifies eligibility of contestants
  • Serves as official point-of-contact with team during contest activities
• Coach must register team 7 days before contest and November 8

Purpose

Given well-known computer science problems, solve them as fast as possible!

• Not about software engineering
• Solve judge's test data correctly
• Run fast enough

Problem types

• Ad Hoc
• Complete Search
• Divide and Conquer
• Greedy
• Dynamic Programming
• Graph
• Mathematics
• String Processing
• Comp. Geometry
• Some harder ones

process

• Learn to type fast http://typingtest.com
• Quick identification test
  • What is the type of this problem?
  • How many minutes will I need to solve it?
• Learn basic algorithm analysis
• Master at least one programming language
  • Reduces amount of time looking at references, use shortcuts, macros, libraries

VERDICT

AC - Accepted

PE - Presentation Error

WA - Wrong Answer

TLE - Time Limit Exceeded

MLE - Memory Limit Exceeded

RTE - Runtime Error

Practice

• Team work
• Coding on blank paper
• Submit and print strategy
• Prepare test data challenges

let's try some problems

Sample input and output

team work

ACM-ICPC Recommended preparation

• ACM-ICPC Live Archive: http://livearchive.onlinejudge.org
• Codeforces: http://codeforces.com
• TopCoder: http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=ProblemArchive

Online Judges:

• UVA Online Judge: http://uva.onlinejudge.org
• SPOJ: http://www.spoj.com
• PKOJ: http://poj.org