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Technical rules

Teams

  1. Only teams accepted by the Regional Contest Director can take part in the contest.
  2. All teams who want to participate have to check-in at the registration desk on Friday or on Saturday. A team cannot compete in the CERC if the participation fee is not paid in advance. No cash will be accepted during the registration.

Conduct of the contest

  1. All team members must attend all contest activities as specified in the schedule. The Coach is expected to attend or be available by phone during contest activities. Failure to attend any of the designated contest events can result in automatic disqualification and forfeiture of any prizes.
  2. At least six problems will be posed. So far as possible, problems will avoid dependence on detailed knowledge of a particular applications area or a particular contest language. However some knowledge of basic graph, text and geometric algorithms can be helpful. (A good source of such algorithms is the book ''Introduction to Algorithms, 2nd edition'' by Cormen, Leisserson, Rivest, and Stein.)
  3. The language of the contest is English. All written contest materials and all communications with contest officials will be in English.
  4. Contestants may bring resource materials such as books, manuals, notes and program listings. Contestants may not bring any machine-readable versions of software or data. Contestants may neither bring their own computers, computer terminals and calculators nor any kind of communication devices such as radio sets, cellular phones, pagers and PDAs.
  5. Solutions to problems (source programs) submitted for judging are called runs. Each run is judged as accepted or rejected and the team is notified of the result.
  6. Rejected runs will be marked as either "compile time error" or "run-time error" or "time-limit exceeded" or "wrong answer" or "contest rule violation."
  7. A contestant may submit a claim of ambiguity or error in a problem statement by submitting a clarification request to a judge. If the judges agree that an ambiguity or error exists, a clarification will be issued to all contestants.
  8. Contestants are not to converse with anyone except members of their own team and personnel designated by the regional contest director. System support staff may advise contestants on system-related problems such as explaining system error messages.
  9. The contest will be held in a networked environment. The network may only be used to submit solutions, to ask questions and to produce listings in ways designated by the organizers. Any other use of the network is strictly forbidden and results in immediate disqualification and removing from the contest area.
  10. While the contest is scheduled for five hours, the regional contest director has the authority to alter the length of the contest in the event of unforeseen difficulties. Should the contest duration be altered, every attempt will be made to notify contestants in a timely and uniform manner.
  11. A team may be disqualified by the regional contest director for any activity that jeopardizes the contest such as dislodging extension cords, unauthorized modification of contest materials (soft- or hardware), forbidden network activities, or distracting behavior.
  12. The contest director is solely responsible for ruling on unforeseen situations and interpreting these rules.

Scoring of the contest

  1. A problem is solved when it is accepted by the judges. The judges are solely responsible for accepting or rejecting submitted runs. In consultation with the judges, the regional contest director determines the winners of the regional contest. The regional contest director and judges are empowered to adjust for or adjudicate unforeseen events and conditions. Their decisions are final.
  2. Teams are ranked according to the most problems solved. Teams who solve the same number of problems are ranked by least total time. The total time is the sum of the time consumed for each problem solved. The time consumed for a solved problem is the time elapsed from the beginning of the contest to the submittal of the accepted run plus 20 penalty minutes for every rejected run for that problem regardless of submittal time. There is no time consumed for a problem that is not solved. In case of a tie, teams are ranked by the number of minutes elapsed from the beginning of the contest until the first correct solution was submitted. If the last rule does not break the tie the regional contest director is responsible to find a fair solution.

Contest environment

The versions of operating system or compilers provided during the contest may differ from these given below.

    Each team will be allowed to use one IBM PC compatible computer. The guaranteed configuration of the computer includes a keyboard, mouse and color monitor.
  1. Users' environment will consist of a Linux workstation running Debian operating system, and X Window System graphical software, with GNOME desktop environment. Standard X Window System utilities, such as xterm or xcal will be provided.
  2. The programming languages of the contest are Java, C, C++ and Pascal.
  3. The name of the submitted program must have one of the following extensions:
    • Java programs
      • .java
      javac -d . -deprecation <filename>
    • C programs
      • .c
      gcc -pipe -static -Wall <filename> -o <exec-name> -lm -O2
    • C++ programs
      • .C
      gcc -pipe -static -Wall <filename> -o <exec-name> -lm -lstdc++ -O2
    • Pascal programs
      • .p
      fpc <filename> -o <exec-name> -lm
  4. Access to the following compilers will be available:
    • Java v. 1.5.0_13 for Java programs
    • Free Pascal Compiler v. 2.2.4 [2009/03/29] for i386
      •
    • GCC v. 4.3.2 for C and C++ programs.
  5. The ANSI C standard library and the standard template library will be available.
  6. For each compiler on-line manual will be installed.
  7. Executable code cannot have more than 5 MB.
  8. Size of the source code cannot exceed 80K.
  9. Each program has 512 MB RAM at its disposal.
  10. Each program has to terminate with an exit code 0 (return 0).
  11. For each submitted program it is not allowed to use one of the following constructs:
    • Usage of creation of any file other than stdin and stdout,
    • usage of more than one thread or process,
    • usage of any network facilities.
  12. Access to a number of editors, including gedit, joe, jed, kate, mcedit, nedit, scite, vim, xemacs and xwpe, will be provided. Debuggers, apart from those in some of aforementioned editors, will be ddd, gdb, xwpe.
  13. Submission of solutions will be done through a WWW browser. GUI-based browser will be provided for this task.