2017 ACM-ICPC North America Qualifier Contest

This page was last updated January 10, 2018 at 19:15 (UTC).

Contest wrap-up

Statistics on the contest

Thanks

This contest is always a lot of fun, but it requires a lot of work. It wouldn't be possible without the amazing folks who volunteered their time to make this happen. Major thank-yous to:

Contest week information

What is the North America Qualifier?

The ACM ICPC North America Qualifier is an online-only programming contest. If you are a coach, you can use it in place of a local competition to help you determine teams for your regional ICPC contest. Or you can use it as extra practice. Despite its name, the North America Qualifier does not qualify (or promote) any team to a regional competition.

The 2017 ACM-ICPC North America Qualifier Contest will be October 7, 2017 at 11:00 - 16:00 (CDT). It is an online contest, held on Kattis.

Registration

Coaches, please register your teams on the Baylor ICPC registration site. At registration close, we will take this data and use it to create the teams on Kattis. Note that you must register for this contest to participate; registering for a regional does not register for this contest, or vice-versa.

Make sure you register your team for the contest titled "North America Qualifier". (There are other contests with the word "Qualifier" in the name, so be careful.) 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.

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 eligible to compete in ICPC in North America (e.g. high school students or people whose school is not in an ICPC North America region). 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):

East Central NA Site Greater NY Site Mid-Atlantic USA Site
Mid-Central USA Site North Central NA Site Northeast North America Site
Pacific Northwest Site Rocky Mountain Site South Central USA Site
Southeast USA Site Southern California Site ICPC Ineligible Site (e.g. for high-school students, students at a university outside North America, etc.)

Coaches may register as many teams as they like (each team can have anywhere from 1 to 10 competitors — that's up to you). If you are in doubt about how many you may need, register more up front (as it will be impossible to add teams after registration freezes). But please try to be somewhat realistic for our planning purposes.

Coaches can create empty teams as placeholders, but should fill them with the actual students that will compete before registration is closed. "Empty" teams will not get competition login credentials.

Basic details

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:

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.

For problem-writers

We are using the Kattis Problem format for developing problems. This is the format used for the ICPC world finals. It provides a structure for problem writeups, test data, solutions, and configuration. It automates problem verification (for solutions and anti-solutions), time limit determination, and finally installation. There are two parts: the problem format and the problem tools.

Kattis problem format

Here is some information on the Kattis problem format:

Kattis problem tools

After you're done writing your problem, you can use the Kattis problemtools software on a Linux machine to verify the problem (using "verifyproblem") or to compile a PDF or HTML version of your problem statement (using problem2pdf or problem2html, respectively). You can get the Kattis problemtools in two ways:


Primary contact: Greg Hamerly