Index
Team Composition
- Teams consist of up to three contestants.
- Teams may only consist of either students of TU or FH Darmstadt.
- A student who has competed in two World Finals or four Regionals is not eligible to compete.
- A student starting university no later then four years before the
contest may compete.
- Registration is mandatory, check the contest site for details.
Conduct of the Contest
- The language of the Contest is UK English. All Contest materials will be written
in UK English.
- Contestants may bring resource materials such as books, manuals, and program listings.
Contestants may not bring any machine-readable versions of software or
data. Also programmable calculators are not allowed. In case of doubt permission has to
be given
by a Contest Judge.
- Solutions to problems submitted for judging are called "runs". Each run is judged
as accepted or rejected by a "Contest Judge" and the team is notified of
the results.
- Notification of accepted runs may be suspended at an appropriate time to keep the
final results secret. A general announcement to that effect will be made
during the contest. Notification of rejected runs will continue until the end of the contest.
- A contestant may submit a claim of ambiguity or error in a problem statement by
submitting a "clarification". If the Judges agree that an ambiguity or error exists,
a "clarification" will be issued to all contestants.
- Contestants are not to converse with anyone except members of their team and personnel
designated by the Contest Director. Systems support staff may advise contestants
on system-related problems such as explaining system error messages.
- While the contest is scheduled for a particular time length, the Contest Director
has the authority to alter the length of the contest in the event of unforeseen
difficulties. Should the contest duration be altered, every attempt will be made to notify
contestants
in a timely and uniform manner.
- A team may be disqualified by the Contest Director for any activity that jeopardises
the contest such as dislodging extension cords, unauthorised modification
of contest materials, any try to change the configuration of the contest PCs or distractive
behaviour. Also using contest resources (computer, printer etc.) for other than direct
problem solving goals is considered distractive behaviour.
- At least five problems will be posed. As far as possible, problems will avoid dependence
on detailed knowledge of a particular applications area or particular contest
language.
The contest usual starts at 10am and ends at 3pm. Buffet and beverages for the contestants
are available. Smoking is prohibited within the building we will lead groups of smokers outside
from time to time. Please keep smoking to a minimum (a good idea for health reasons anyway).
The results and the problemset will be made available after the contests. Source code created
by the teams are usually available as well.
Scoring of the Contest
- The Contest Judges are solely responsible for determining the correctness of submitted
runs. The winners of the Contest are determined by the Contest Judges and
th Contest Director. The Contest Judges are empowered to adjust for or adjudicate unforeseen
events and conditions.
- Teams will be ranked by the total number of correct solutions. For the purpose
of awards, or in determining qualifier(s) for the ACM Contest, teams who
solve the same number of problems are ranked by least total time. If this results in a
draw
situation the least number of attempts for each solved problems are taken
into account.
First the number of submissions for the problem with the most attempts
are compared.
- The total time is the sum of the time consumed for each problem solved. The time
consumed for a solved problem is the time elapsed from the beginning of
the contest to the submittal of the accepted run plus 20 penalty minutes for every rejected
run for that problem regardless of submittal time. There is no time consumed for
a problem
that is not solved.
Programming Environment
- Each team will use a single computer terminal. Each team will have reasonably equivalent
computing resources.
-
The programming languages of the Contest are C, C++ and Java.
- Library functions having to do with files, processes and sockets are
considered illegal.
- For each submitted program it is not allowed to use one of the following constructs:
- Usage or creation of any file other than stdin, stderr and stdout
- Usage of (inline) assembly code
- Usage of more than one thread or process
- Usage of any network facility except contacting the automatic contest judge
- It is the responsibility of the teams, not of the compiler, to insure that the
program applies with the rules given above.
