Competition rules 2004

(This is a preliminary version of the rules. There may be minor changes.)

Note: Paragraph 8 has been changed!

Organisation

The contest will be held on Saturday, 2nd October 2003, simultaneously in Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim, and maybe other cities. Teams/Universities may choose to compete at any of these sites as long as it has been cleared with the local organizer of that site.

Teams are assigned on a first-come first-served basis, but each school is guaranteed at least two places in the contest.

The contest director is solely responsible for interpreting the rules and for ruling on any unforeseen situations.

1. Behaviour

Candidates are allowed to use any written resource material such as books, manuals, and program listings. Contestants may not bring any machine-readable versions of software or data. Contestants may not bring their own computers, computer terminals or calculators. Contestants may not bring any kind of communication device such as radio sets or cellular phones. New! If the local arranger allows it, candidates may be allowed to prepare the editor environment as long as the modifications do not produce programming language source code.

Teams may use on-line official programming language documentation like man pages.

Teams may not accept help or advice on the problems from anyone not authorized by the contest director or head judge to give advice.

The contest will be held in a networked environment. The network may only be used to access official programming language documentation like Sun's Java documentation, to submit problems, and to produce listings. Remote login, ftp, telnet, mail, or other networking activities within the contest environment or with machines outside this environment are strictly forbidden.

A team may be disqualified by the contest director for any activity that jeopardizes the contest.

During the contest each team will have one copy of the problems and one single computer to their disposal.

2. Language

Each problem will be posed in either English or Norwegian. All clarification requests must be expressed in English or Norwegian.

3. Equipment

The contest site will provide computers and software. The contestants cannot expect a particular operating system or text editor. For example, some sites will provide only a Unix enviroment with the Emacs editor while others will have only Windows.

4. Ambiguities and problems

Judges will not invite questions about the problems. As far as possible, problems will avoid dependence on detailed knowledge of a particular applications area or a particular contest language. A contestant may submit a written claim of ambiguity or error in a problems statement by submitting a clarification request. If the judges agree that an ambiguity or error exists, a clarification will be issued to all contestants.

In case of trouble with the hardware or software set at the disposal of the teams by the organisers, this should be submitted as a written claim. The organisers will do their best to find an acceptable solution.

5. Solutions

All programs should be written in Pascal, C, C++, or Java. The STL of C++ may be used.

The program should consist of source code and the filename should be as stated in the problem. Some sites might not give the option to use Pascal. This should be checked with the local organizers before the competition.

The input should be read from standard input. This input is guaranteed to have the format as stated, unless the problem explicitly states the contrary.

The output should be written to standard output, unless otherwise stated. The output should be exactly equal to the format asked in the problem, as the jury may verify some of the problems by an automatic file comparison.

The range of input data will be explicitly stated in the problems.

6. Verification of the solutions

Solutions submitted for judging are called runs. How the submission procedure works will be explained at the beginning of the contest by the jury.

Each run is judged as accepted or rejected and the team is notified of the results. Judged runs will be marked as follows: correct, compilation error, runtime error, runtime limit exceeded, wrong output, file not found. In the last five cases the program is considered as being not correct. The error mentioned is the first error found by the judges.

7. Rank

Teams are ranked according to the most problems solved. Teams who solve the same number of problems are ranked by least total time. 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 minutes for each rejected run. There is no time consumed for a problem that is not solved.

8. Team composition

Each team consists of up to three contestants from the same school. Each contestant must be a student enrolled in a degree program with at least a half-time load.

New rules!

No team member may have been a student for more than five years. This means anyone starting at a European university in 2000 or later fulfill this rule.

(If you have had a break in your studies, you may apply for permission to compete.)

Also note that:

Last updated 27.09.2004 by Dag Langmyhr.