2013 ACM-ICPC North American Qualification Contest
This page was last updated October 06, 2013 at 3:24 (UTC).
The second ACM-ICPC North American Qualification Contest was held on October 5th
2013. Many details are provided below.
Contest results
597 teams participated (submitted something), and 581 (97%) solved at least one
problem. There were 7169 submissions during the 5 hours, or about one
submission every 2.6 seconds, and an average of 12.1 submissions per submitting
team.
Here is the distribution of the number of solutions per team. Keep in mind that
the number of people on a team was not fixed.
# problems solved: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
# teams: | 167 | 105 | 81 | 56 | 39 | 31 | 23 | 20 | 15 | 39 | 5 |
The most popular problems in terms of submissions (both correct and incorrect) were:
Problem: | goldbach | oddities | erraticants | evenup | ternarianweights | biggest | 4thought | shotcube | island | walkway | plot |
# Submissions: | 1520 | 1107 | 881 | 849 | 797 | 696 | 609 | 302 | 224 | 206 | 118 |
And the most popular problems solved in terms of number of correct submissions were:
Problem: | oddities | goldbach | 4thought | ternarianweights | evenup | erraticants | plot | walkway | biggest | island | shotcube |
# Accepted Submissions: | 590 | 376 | 271 | 211 | 205 | 155 | 104 | 101 | 84 | 69 | 5 |
Here are the problem statements and
the Judge's test data.
Thanks
Many thanks to all those who helped put on this contest:
- All who submitted problems: Andy Nguyen, Bruce Elenbogen, David Sturgill,
Howard Cheng, Ivor Page, Mike Slattery, Nankai Pan, Nathan Backman, Stuart
Hansen, Tom Fuller, Xiaoyuan Suo
- All who reviewed problems: Brent Baas, Brian Howard, Bruce Elenbogen, Choong-Soo Lee, Danny Sleator, David Sturgill, Denis Savenkov, Erik Learned-Miller, H. Keith Edwards, Howard Cheng, Howard Whitston, Jeff Kinne, John Franco, Julie Johnson, Kevin Wortman, Liam Keliher, Manki Min, Michael H. Goldwasser, Mike Slattery, Nandan Garg, Nathan Backman, Robert Kasper, Stephen Bloch, Stephen Taylor, Steven Skiena, Stuart Hansen, Tom Fuller
- Howard Cheng and David Sturgill for extra help with judging and clarification requests.
- Marsha Poucher, Roman Smetana, and Jeff Donahoo for helping with registration.
- The folks at Scrool for hosting the contest on Kattis: Mikael Goldmann, Gunnar Kreitz, Per Austrin, Pehr Söderman, and Fredrik Niemelä
Kattis accounts have been created and an email has been sent to each coach with
account information. Emails were sent October 4th at 10:15 AM CDT.
This email has a link to the problem statements (for printing purposes, if you
wish to do so; the problems will be available online via Kattis during the
contest). Please look for this email (check your spam folders) from
hamerly@cs.ecs.baylor.edu.
Registration (closed)
You can register for the contest until September 30th 2013 (at 23:59 CST). There
is one contest, with 12 "sites". The 12 sites correspond to the 11 regions of
North America, plus one extra site for contestants who are not ICPC-eligible
(e.g. high school students). Please register for the site that corresponds to
your region. Here are direct links for each region (using these is likely the
simplest route to registration):
You may register as many teams as you like, but please try to be realistic.
Teams may have up to 10 members.
After registration is closed, due to the number of teams and the limited
support it will be impossible to accommodate new registrations or changes to
existing registrations. So please register early, make sure you are registered
correctly and for the correct contest and site. Note that you should register
for the contest called "North American Qualifier". There are other contests with
the word "Qualifier" in the name, so be careful; and registering for your
regional contest does not register you for this contest.
Once registration is closed, you will receive information on how to access the
contest control system (Kattis) via email to the registered coach of each team.
Basic details
- What is it? An online programming contest, offered as a
drop-in replacement for so-called "qualifying" contests (e.g. school-level,
pre-regional competitions).
- When is the contest? October 5, 2013, 2:00-7:00 PM Central Time (see this
page for the time in your time zone).
- When does official registration begin? September 20th.
- When does official registration close? September 30th at
23:59 CST is the advanced registration deadline.
- Can I register after registration is closed? No, due to the
number of expected people participating and the limited support. Please make
sure to register for the correct contest before the deadline.
- Where do I register? See the links above on this page.
- What contest should I register for? The site
corresponding to your region. Note that this is the "North America Qualifier",
not a regional competition. As the names of different contests may look
similar, please make sure you register for the North America Qualifier, and
the site corresponding to your region.
- What if I am not a part of ICPC? Please register then for
the ICPC-Ineligible site. This is for contestants who are (e.g.) in high
school or are otherwise ineligible to participate in a North American ICPC
region.
- Is this a qualifying contest, a practice contest, or something
else? We are calling this a qualifying contest for the regional
competitions. It can be (but is not required to be) used to help choose teams
for the regional programming competition.
- Why is it being offered so early in the fall? To make
sure it precedes all North American regional competitions.
- Must students participate in teams of three? You may make
teams of one to 10 contestants, but no prescribed number is required. Your
decision for your school and teams.
- Must I participate? No. If you don't find this useful for
your situation, feel free to ignore it.
- I already offer a contest. Why should I use this one?
There are several benefits. It will save you work, increase registration for
your region (which helps in allocation of wildcard slots for the world
finals), and gives all registered students a free year of ACM student
membership.
- How will results be used? However the coaches choose to
use them. The results do not dictate anything about which contestants get to
go to regionals, for example. However, one way we envision a coach may use the
results is to select the top-finishing team(s) for the regional competition.
- Where should I go to compete? You compete wherever you
are. This is an online competition, so teams can meet in a common location,
but we are not organizing that.
- What resources does a local site need to provide? For
each team, a computer with internet access, a web browser, and whatever
development environment(s) you wish.
- What judging system will be used? Kattis. You can create a free account and try out Kattis at
www.kattis.com. Note that the actual contest will be hosted at a different
website.
- Do I need to provide / can I provide my own judging? No,
it will be done through Kattis and our centralized contest management.
- Can I provide my own problems? We welcome your offer to
contribute problems to the official problem set -- if you wish to do this,
please contact Greg Hamerly. However, we
will not support additional problems for just one site.
- What languages will be supported? C, C++, and Java.
- How many problems will there be? About 10.
- What will be the difficulty level of the problems? We are
aiming for a wide range, with multiple easier problems for novice programmers.
- How will the contest run? Contestants will submit code
and receive responses via the web. Coaches/facilitators should ensure the
integrity of their own contestants (such as internet usage during the contest,
appropriate books and materials, etc.).
- Is this one contest or multiple contests? While we will
use one set of problems, offered at one time, each participating school will
be in its own contest with its own set of results. Results will not be
collated across schools.
- How much does this cost? It's free.
- Will there be a practice portion of this contest?
You can practice using the Kattis system at kattis.com. You can create a free account
and submit problems to the judging system, just like in the qualifier. The
actual qualifier will be hosted at a different website with different
credentials.
- Who should I contact with questions? Greg Hamerly
Contest scoring
This contest scoring system will be the same as the world finals. That is, the
winner is the team solving the most problems. If two teams solve the same number
of problems, then the team with the lowest time is the winner. If two teams
have the same time the submission time of the last solved problem is used as a
tie-breaker.
The time is the sum of the time of submission (in minutes) of the earliest
correct submission for each solved problem, plus any penalty minutes for each
incorrect submission of a problem prior to solving that problem. Penalties are
20 minutes for any of the following reasons:
- Run Time Error
- Time Limit Exceeded
- Wrong Answer
- Output Limit Exceeded
- Memory Limit Exceeded
Compile error does not incur a penalty; it is not considered a valid submission.
Illegal Function does not incur a penalty, but any illegal function will be
investigated and a team may be disqualified from the competition if the judges
consider the program an attempt to exploit the contest system.
For more information on how Kattis scores problems, please see Kattis documentation.
Primary contact:
Greg Hamerly