The 2008 TUD Programming Contest is over, see here for the results.
Quoted from the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Fact Sheet:
"The contest pits teams of three university students against eight or more complex, real-world problems, with a grueling five-hour deadline. Huddled around a single computer, competitors race against the clock in a battle of logic, strategy and mental endurance.
Teammates collaborate to rank the difficulty of the problems, deduce the requirements, design test beds, and build software systems that solve the problems under the intense scrutiny of expert judges. For a well-versed computer science student, some of the problems require precision only. Others require a knowledge and understanding of advanced algorithms. Still others are simply too hard to solve – except, of course, for the world’s brightest problem-solvers. Judging is relentlessly strict. The students are given a problem statement – not a requirements document. They are given an example of test data, but they do not have access to the judges’ test data and acceptance criteria. Each incorrect solution submitted is assessed a time penalty. You don’t want to waste your customer’s time when you are dealing with the supreme court of computing. The team that solves the most problems in the fewest attempts in the least cumulative time is declared the winner."
The TU Darmstadt Programming Contest serves as a preliminary round for the international contest. The rules are the same: Teams of three students, eight or more problems, five hours. Students of TU Darmstadt and h_da (former FH) are allowed to participate. The contest is not restricted to computer science students.
The winners will proceed to the North Western European Regional Contest (NWERC). Even if you do not win, it will sure be lots of fun.To participate in the NWERC the team members have to pass the team composition rules for regional contests.
In 2005 we started developing our own contest system consisting of a server component and a java client, used to submit solutions to our server. Details of the system (which is published as open-source) is available here.
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