Rules and Notes

Summary of Rules

The SER Regional Contest is governed by the rules of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), see the ICPC Regional Rules. What follows is a summary, elaboration, and interpretation of the rules. size limit
  1. Eligible participants are students who are enrolled at least half-time at a post-secondary institution. Participants must be eligible, willing, and able to compete in the ICPC World Finals. See the eligibility flow chart Team members must be registered by Fri, XX October 2009 with the ICPC Registration System.
  2. A team consists of three members who work at one computer.
  3. No electronic media and no electronic devices of any kind (calculators, cell phones, pagers, pdas, etc) may be brought into the contest area. Each team may bring written material (books, notebooks, etc) up to a total volume of 12"x12"x2" for everything.
  4. The problem set consists of eight to twelve problems in English. The contest will last five hours. The source code will be submitted to the judges who will determine if it will be accepted as a solution to a problem by testing its input/output behavior. [Elegant and well-written programs will impress the judges, but do not affect the scoring.]
  5. The goal is to solve as many problems as possible in as little time as possible. Ties are broken by time. The time assessed for a solved problem is the time elapsed from the beginning of the contest to the time of the earliest correct submission. Twenty penalty minutes are added for every incorrect submission for a problem (before a correct submission). There are no penalty minutes for correct submissions (no matter how many), and no penalty minutes are assessed for a problem that is not solved.
  6. During the contest the team may not receive outside help in solving the problems. The participants may not communicate with anyone other than their teammates (if necessary, participants may talk with the contest staff). A team may be disqualified by the site director for violating the rules, or for any disruptive, offensive, malicious, or deceptive activity.
  7. It is not permitted to ask any questions about the problem set. However, a contestant may submit a claim of ambiguity or error in a problem statement by submitting a PC2 clarification request. If an ambiguity or error is ever found in the problem set, a PC2 clarification will be issued to all contestants.
  8. If a problem or a question about hardware, facilities, or administration arises, then get the attention of the contest staff for assistance. If irregularities or misconduct are observed during the contest, team members or coaches should bring them to the attention of the contest officials so that action may be taken as soon as possible. There is an appeals process described in the ICPC rules.

Notes to Teams

  1. No particular file name is required for submitting a program. (In Java, the name of the main class should be identical to the name of the file, or bad things will happen.)
  2. All programs are subject to unspecified (but reasonable) limits on time, space, and I/O resources. You may assume solutions are possible for the judges' test cases will run in seconds not hours.
  3. The input to all programs will come from the standard input stream, not from a file. The output of all programs will be to the standard output stream, not to a file. Your program should not create any files. Output to the standard error will be ignored. In other words, you should not open any files, nor be concerned with the name of any I/O files. The standard error stream will be ignored and can be used for debugging output.
  4. All input will be US-ASCII text. This means the input will consist of lines of printable US-ASCII characters terminated by the Unix line terminator, the US-ASCII linefeed character. The output of all programs should likewise be US-ASCII text.
  5. You may assume all input data is formatted as specified in the problem statement. The behavior of a program on input data that does not conform to the problem statement will not be tested. For example, if the problem says there will be three integers on an input line, you may assume that there will indeed be three integers on the line in the test data, and that the program does not have to check for the possibility that there are letters or punctuation on the line.
  6. All program output is compared character-by-character with the correct output.
  7. The judges will report one of the following reasons when a program is rejected:

    Except for "compilation error", these reasons for rejection are extremely weak hints from the judges about what they observed. A program rejected for "run-time error" might have encountered the run-time error after printing all the correct output, after printing incorrect output, or before any output was printed. The response is at the discretion of the judges; do not read too much into the reasons for rejection. The judges are not debugging your program.

  8. Any disruptive, offensive, malicious, or deceptive program is grounds for disqualification of the team from the contest.