2014 ACM-ICPC North America Qualification Contest
This page was last updated September 29, 2014 at 15:09 (UTC).
The third ACM-ICPC North America Qualification Contest was held on
September 27, 2014 from 2:00-7:00 PM Central Time (see this
page for the time in your time zone).
The North America Qualifier is an online (distributed) programming contest,
offered as a drop-in replacement for so-called "qualifying" contests (e.g.
school-level, pre-regional competitions).
Contest summary
There were 11 problems given. Here are the problem statements and the Judge's test data.
You can try out the problems on Open
Kattis. If you don't have an account, you can create one for free. Here are
direct links to the problems:
- Eight Queens
- Color Walk
- Flexible Spaces
- Flip Five
- Human Cannonball Run
- Mixed Fractions
- Pesky Mosquitoes
- Narrow Art Gallery
- Tractor
- Units
- Yikes -- Bikes!
We had 679 teams sign in today, and 636 teams solve something -- that's 93.6%
of teams that signed in solving something. There were 6538 total submissions
over 5 hours, which is 21.8 submissions per minute on average.
Here is a distribution of the number of problems solved by teams (which
includes some teams that did not show up):
| PROBLEMS SOLVED | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| #TEAMS | 387 | 79 | 127 | 182 | 75 | 52 | 29 | 23 | 22 | 25 | 15 | 7 |
Here is a distribution over how often each problem was solved:
| A (8queens) | B (colorwalk) | C (flexible) | D (flipfive) | E (humancannonball) | F (mixedfractions) | G (mosquitoes) | H (narrowartgallery) | I (tractor) | J (units) | K (yikes) |
|---|
| Solved / Tries | 434/1617 (26%) | 9/55 (16%) | 541/864 (62%) | 212/425 (49%) | 111/199 (55%) | 626/956 (65%) | 65/263 (24%) | 124/368 (33%) | 117/686 (17%) | 135/252 (53%) | 28/333 (8%) |
|---|
| Average tries | 2.83 | 3.06 | 1.47 | 1.60 | 1.53 | 1.46 | 2.31 | 1.93 | 2.33 | 1.49 | 3.30 |
|---|
| Averages tries to solve | 2.66 | 2.33 | 1.33 | 1.42 | 1.37 | 1.37 | 2.09 | 1.67 | 1.99 | 1.30 | 2.50 |
|---|
Thanks
With a large contest like this, many hands make light work. Thank you very much to everyone who contributed to this contest:
- Problem submitters: Alex Wei, Andy Nguyen, Bruce Elenbogen, David Sturgill, Ivor Page, Michael Goldwasser, Michal Zmuda, Nathan Backman, Rob Hochberg, Yang Yan
- Problem reviewers: Barry Wittman, Brian Dean, Brian Harrington, Brian Howard, Bruce Elenbogen, Choong-Soo Lee, Chris Seltzer, Daniel Andresen, Daniel Fleischman, Darko Aleksic, David A. Poplawski, David Sturgill, David Walter, Denis Savenkov, Dennis Matveyev, Eric Harley, Gruia Calinescu, H. Keith Edwards, Howard Cheng, Howard Whitston, Ivor Page, Jay Shaffstall, Jay Urbain, Jeff Kinne, Joshua T. Guerin, Judy Williams, Kevin Wortman, Michael Doherty, Michael Goldwasser, Michael Thompson, Michal Zmuda, Nathan Backman, Nathan Gossett, Neil Girdhar, Olaf Hall-Holt, Per Austrin, Richard Peng, Rob Hochberg, Sahand Saba, Saturnino Garcia, Scott Reed, Sean Deitz, Stephen Taylor, Steven Skiena, Tim Korb, Uttam Thakore
- Howard Cheng and David Sturgill for serving as judges
- The ICPC registration team
- The team at Kattis for hosting the contest and providing lots of support, especially Mikael Goldmann, Gunnar Kreitz, Per Austrin, Pehr Söderman, Fredrik Niemelä.
Registration
Registration is now closed. If you (as a coach) have registered teams on
icpc.baylor.edu for the North America Qualifier, then you are done. If you have
missed registration, we apologize but no additional teams may be registered at
this point due to time constraints.
Basic details
- What is it? An online (distributed) programming contest,
offered as a drop-in replacement for so-called "qualifying" contests (e.g.
school-level, pre-regional competitions).
- When is the contest? Saturday, September 27, 2014 2:00-7:00 PM Central Time (see this
page for the time in your time zone).
- When does official registration begin? Registration is open until September 20th.
- When does official registration close? September 20th.
- 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 you should organize that on your own.
- 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
open.kattis.com. Note that the actual contest will be hosted at a different
website with different login credentials (which your coach will
receive via email after registration closes).
- 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 open.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