University of Maryland High School Programming Contest Rules and Information ----------------- Contest Specifics ----------------- 1.Each team will use ONE computer --- other computers in the labs must stay powered down. No computer equipment may be brought into the contest area, except for one USB mouse per team. 2.Teams are allowed to bring a reasonable number of computer books and/or notebooks into the contest area for use during the contest. Teams are NOT ALLOWED to bring a disk, software, or machine-readable software into the contest area. 3.Teams will not have their own printer. A network printer will be accessible. 4.No food or drink in the labs. There will be lunch before the contest, and refreshments supplied afterwords. 5.Any questions to the judges should be submitted online using the Contest Forum software. All questions are submitted in private. Each question will be acknowledged, although the judges may refuse to answer any question. The question and its answer may be provided to all contestants if it seems relevant. 6.The only discussion permitted is within a team and with the contest staff. Teams are not allowed to use telephones, cell phones, pagers, or other wireless devices to contact or talk to anyone else during the contest. 7.Teams are allowed to use calculators (hand-held or the built-in Windows calculator). Teams are not allowed to use non-contest software on their computers. Teams are not allowed to use web browsers, telnet, ssh, ftp, or other networking software to obtain help on their contest problems. 8.You may work on the problems in any order, and submit them in any order. 9.Your programs must not do any file input or output. All contest input will come from stdin -- that is, the keyboard, and all output must go to stdout -- that is, to the console. 10.You need consider the efficiency of your algorithms to make sure it will take less than 1 minute of running time. For some of the problems there exist solutions that might work, but are so inefficient that they will not finish in the allowed time. 11.To receive credit for a problem solution, you must turn it in for judging, using the PC^2 software. 12.The judges' decision is FINAL. ---------------- Scoring ---------------- The team that has had the most problems judged correct at the end of the contest will be declared the winner. If more than one team has solved the same number of problems, the winner is the one with the fewest penalty points. Penalty points are assessed for solved problems only. Each problem accumulates one penalty point for each minute from the beginning of the contest until the time of a correct submission. Twenty penalty points are assessed for each incorrect submission. The contest director reserves the right to adjust penalty points to allow for unforeseen circumstances. ------------------- Eclipse Environment ------------------- The Eclipse Java development environment is provided in /Applications/eclipse. Each contest problem should appear as a project in Eclipse, and includes the following files: - .java Skeleton solution code - 01.in Sample input data - 01.out Expected output for sample input data - my.in Placeholder for making up your own input data - TryTest.java Will run your solution code for 01.in and compare its output to 01.out. Repeat run for my.in. The project files are in the Eclipse workspace directory. --------------------- PC^2 Contest Software --------------------- The contest will use the PC^2 software. Once you believe your solution code works (it should at least pass the sample input data in TryTest), you may use the PC^2 software to submit your code to the judges. The submission process should proceed as follows: 1) From the "Submit Run" tab, select the contest problem. 2) Select the main java file (the one provided as part of the skeleton solution). 3) Select any additional java files you added to the main java file. 4) Use the "Test" button to ensure your solution code works properly for sample input data, when tested using the same environment as the contest server. 5) Use the "Submit" button to submit your contest problem solution. You can use the "View Runs" tab to check the status of your submissions, and use the "Request Clarification" tab to ask private questions about the contest problems. ---------------- Contest Web Page ---------------- The contest web page provides a number of links: Observers This will show the current scores of all the teams. The ScoreBoard will be updated every few minutes. The scores hyperlink will be disabled during the last 30 minutes of the contest. Contest Problems Once the contest starts, this will provide a description of all the contest problems identical to the paper version. Contest Rules Rules for the contest Eclipse Info Basic information on the Eclipse environment. PC^2 Guide A tutorial on how to use the PC^2 contest software. Java API (1.6) - A description of the Java 1.6 API, including class libraries.