Q. How many people can be on a team?
Q. What languages & platforms will be used for the contest?
C++ and Java and Python 2/3. The contest will be judged using 64 bit intel-architecture ubuntu linux servers. See Portability Issues to consider if you are working from some other systems.
Q. What can we bring?
Books, printouts, scratch paper. Basically, nothing electronic, or electronically readable media. This means possesion of cell phones, calculators, tablets, flash drives etc. is not allowed during the contest.
Q. What do you provide?
Site specific, but your team will have a single workstation, be fed, and have access to a classroom (or part of one) or similar place to work in relative privacy.
Q. What problems should we do first?
Since the time penalty for each correct problem is from the start of the contest, you should get the easiest problems done first. Note that determining which problems are easy is part of the contest! Seeing how other teams are progressing on the problems can help your team determine this.
Q. What do we submit?
A single source file which (if correct) solves the problem. With the following conventions.
| Language | Convention | Example | Build & Run |
|---|---|---|---|
| C++ | Extension is .cpp |
count.cpp:
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
string line;
int lines=0;
while (getline(cin,line)) {
++lines;
}
cout << lines << endl;
return 0;
}
|
g++ -g -O2 -std=gnu++11 -static -o count count.cpp -lm ./count <count.in >count.out |
| C | Extension is .c |
count.c:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string>
#define MAX_LINE_LENGTH 100000
char linebuffer[MAX_LINE_LENGTH+1];
int main()
{
int lines=0;
while (fgets(linebuffer,MAX_LINE_LENGTH+1,stdin)!=0) {
++lines;
}
printf("%d\n",lines);
return 0;
}
|
gcc -g -O2 -std=gnu99 -static -o count count.c -lm ./count <count.in >count.out |
| Java | Extension is .java and public class of base name with no (default) package. |
count.java:
public class count {
public static void main(String[] args)
throws Exception {
String line;
int lines=0;
java.util.Scanner in=
new java.util.Scanner(System.in);
while (in.hasNextLine()) {
line=in.nextLine();
++lines;
}
System.out.println(lines);
}
}
|
javac -encoding UTF-8 -sourcepath . -d . count.java java -Xss64m count <count.in >count.out |
| Python 2 | Extension is .py and shebang (#!) of /usr/bin/python. |
count.py:
#!/usr/bin/python import sys print sum(1 for line in sys.stdin) |
chmod +x count.py ./count.py <count.in >count.out |
| Python 3 | Extension is .py and shebang (#!) of /usr/bin/python3. |
count.py:
#!/usr/bin/python3 import sys print(sum(1 for line in sys.stdin)) |
chmod +x count.py ./count.py <count.in >count.out |
The judging system actually lets you turn in any source file for any problem, but sticking to this convention keeps you from turning a solution to the wrong problem.
Q. How do we edit/compile/run our code?
Again site specific. Assuming you are using a unix-like operating system the least-common-denominator editor is probably pico, which you can run by typing
Q. How do we test our code?
Here's a test checklist:
Note that some problems are nondeterministic, in that they allow for more than one correct answer for a given input. diff is inadequate for determining the correctness of such programs. The judges, of course, will not use diff to determine the correctness of such problems.
Q. How do we debug our code?
More site specific. gdb is the command line debugger for C and C++ programs, and you might have ddd, which is a gui-interface for this. Read the banners and h is for help. The installed IDE's should support debugging; and otherwise think about print statements with an if (debug) mask.
In the judge setting, your program will be run with no arguments and the output of STDERR is ignored. You can use these mechanisms to report debugging information without changing how it behaves during judgement (although creating lots of debugging output that is ignored can hurt how long it takes your program to run).
Q. How do we submit a problem/clarification?
We will be using Kattis for our judge environment this year. You should have gotten an email about creating a kattis account from your team registration, and you can try the warmup at https://warmup.kattis.com before the contest at https://rmc16.kattis.com.
Q. How are teams ranked?
Teams are first ranked by number of correct solutions: the more problems which are solved by a team, the higher their rank.
Teams that have finished the same number of problems are then ranked by fewest penalty points: the fewer points, the higher the rank. The penalty points accrued for your team is the sum of:
Example: The contest starts at 10:00 am; Team Zorbo, turns in problem 1 correctly at 10:43, makes two incorrect submissions of problem 2 before submitting a correct solution at 12:35, and makes 3 incorrect submissions for problem 3 without ever turning in a correct solution. The Zorbos would have 225 penalty points, broken down in the following table:
| Problem | Submission Penalty | Time Penalty | Total |
| 1 | 0*20 = 0 | 0:43 = 43 | 43 |
| 2 | 2*20 = 40 | 2:25 = 145 | 185 |
| total | 2*20 = 40 | 3:08 = 188 | 225 |
Note that there is no penalty accrued for problem 3, since it was never submitted correctly
Incidentally, the last tie-breaker rule is the time of the last correct submission.
Enjoy the contest!