ACM-ICPC

ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Asia Regional Contest 2012 in Tokyo

Domestic Contests

To participate in Tokyo Site of the Asia Regional Contest, any Japan-based team (team that belongs to a university or college in Japan) must compete in the Domestic Contest (Japan Nationwide Internet Contest).

A non-Japan-based team (whose members all belong to a university / college in a foreign country) do NOT NEED to participate in the Domestic Contest.

When: July 6 (Fri) 16:30-19:30 (practice time 11:00-15:00)
Where: Each team competes at their university/college. *Held over the Internet*
How: Get the problems and input data from a specified WWW site. Write a program. Submit the program through a Web interface.
Note: The URL for the WWW site will be announced via e-mail.

About 7 problems in total
Problems description will be written in English. Japanese versions will also be available.

Each team must have 3 contestants and 1 coach. Throughout the contest, each team shall be supervised by a faculty member as a proctor. A proctor may supervise two or more teams.

27 teams will be selected to participate in the Asia Regional. In addition, 7 non-Japan-based teams and 1 wildcard team will be chosen for a grand total of 35 teams participating in the Asia Regional Tokyo on-site Contest.

Competition Rules

Below describes the Competition Rules in the Domestic Contest:

1. Programming languages: Contestants shall not use programming languages other than C, C++, and Java. Contestants may use a development environment such as Eclipse and Visual Studio. A program that internally activates programs in other languages (perl, python, etc.) is not considered as a valid answer.
2. No electronic preparation: Contestants shall not preliminarily put electronic materials (sample programs, algorithm descriptions, etc.) on the machines used in the competition. Contestants shall not use removable media (such as floppy disk and CD-ROM), desktop calculators, electronic dictionaries, or mobile phones, either. On the other hand, it is allowed to bring non-electronic materials, such as text books, dictionaries, and so on. Electronic information contestants may access includes only web pages for problem inspection and answer submission, and manuals on the machines (man, info, Java API document, and SGI STL specifications, etc.).
3. No contact with non-team members: Contestants shall contact only with other contestants of the same team during the contest. However, contestants shall not contact with the team coach or the reserve member. Electronic mails and chats are prohibited during the contest, except for contacting with the judges.
4. No remote accesses: Contestants shall not access the Web, except for accessing the problems, submitting answers and checking the standings on the specific pages of the contest. Accessing other machines, using remote access commands such as ftp and ssh, is also prohibited. Contestants shall send/receive e-mails to/from the judges.
5. Only one computer: Although each team has three members, each team is allowed to use only one computer during the contest. Only one mouse and one keyboard can be connected to the computer, and no other input devices are permitted. However, each team is allowed to use a printer.
6. No automatic programming tools: Contestants shall not use any programming support tool that can generate programs automatically, such as yacc and lex.
7. Certification: To Proctors: Please send a certification to the Organizing Committee immediately after the contest. Details of sending the certification are to be announced after team registration.

Scoring Rules

Competition Process

At the start time of the Domestic Contest, the problems are published on the WWW pages announced in advance.
Each team freely chooses any of the problems and starts to write programs.
When they have a completed program for a problem, they run it with the given input data.
They then submit the output (execution result) and the program (source codes) to the judges by using a predefined method (through the web), in order to have judgment on whether their answer is right or not.

By repeating this process, each team competes to solve more problems in less time.

Answer Judgment and Input Data

A team is considered to have solved a problem when an identical program written by them could give the right outputs for two successive inputs, for both of which the team had not made a right output.
4 different inputs are prepared for each problem, and the first one is given in the problem statement.
When a program by a team makes the right output for one input, then they receive another input to check whether the same program can make the right output for the latter input.
When a submitted program makes the right output for one input but not for the next input, the latter input is used upon the next program submission.
An example is described below.

Suppose a team submitted a program p1, which made the right output for the input d1.
Then the team is required to make the right output using the same program p1.
If the right output is made, it means the team has solved the problem.
If not, the team needs to try with another program p2 for the input d2 (not d1).
If the second program p2 made the right output for the input d2, then another input d3 was provided and checked.

This implies that an input is "consumed" if a program submission makes the right output for one input but not for the next input.
So if the team has such situations three times, then it does not have sufficient inputs to solve the problem anymore.
At the Domestic Contest, execution time or memory consumption is not evaluated as all the programs are executed on the local machine of each team.

Standings

The standings are determined by applying the following rules.

The more problems a team solves, the higher order it has.
If multiple teams have the same number of solved problems, a team with a smaller penalty value has a higher order than a team with a larger penalty value. The penalty value is the sum of the following values for each of the problems that have been solved by the team.

The duration between the start time of the contest and the time the team solved the problem (minutes).
The number of submissions with wrong answers multiplied by 20 minutes (no penalty for wrong submissions for problems that have not been solved by the team)

An example is described below.

Suppose the contest started at 16:30.
- Problem A Solved at 17:10 - Penalty of 40 minutes
- Problem B Wrong submissions at 17:30 and at 17:50 Solved at 18:10 - Penalty of 100 + 20 * 2 minutes
- Problem C Wrong submissions at 18:55 and at 19:25 Not solved finally
- Problem D Wrong submissions at 18:00 Not solved finally
- Problem E Not solved finally
In this case, the team has solved 2 problems and has the penalty value of 180 minutes.

Selection Rules

Japan-based teams, or teams whose members belong to a university/college in Japan, are selected for the Asia Regional Tokyo On Site Contest as follows:

Prerequisite

The team participated in the Domestic Contest held on July 6, 2012.

Step 1: The following procedures are performed for all teams in decreasing order of their scores. Let A be the team of interest.
Rule 1:: If the total number of teams selected so far is less than 5:
A is selected as a participant in the Asia Regional Tokyo On Site Contest, unless 4 teams are already selected from the same university/college.
Rule 2:: If the total number of teams selected so far is less than 10:
A is selected as a participant in the Asia Regional Tokyo On Site Contest, unless 3 teams are already selected from the same university/college.
Rule 3:: If the total number of teams selected so far is less than 20:
A is selected as a participant in the Asia Regional Tokyo On Site Contest, unless 2 teams are already selected from the same university/college.
Rule 4:: If the total number of teams selected so far is less than 25:
A is selected as a participant in the Asia Regional Tokyo On Site Contest, unless another team is already selected from the same university/college.
Rule 5:: The team, which solves one ore more problems, with the highest score among those with one or more female contestants and with no other teams from the same university/college selected in the step 1 is selected as a participant in the Asia Regional Tokyo On Site Contest.
Step 2: If the number of selected teams is less than 27 after Step 2: The remaining participants will be selected by the Asia Regional Tokyo On Site Contest director taking in consideration the results of the Nationwide Internet Contest (Domestic Contest).
Exception: If a selected team declines the invitation, an additional team is selected through the Step 2.

Simulation System Rental

If you want to have training by simulating the Domestic Contest, you can rent a system identical to the one used there. Please check the Japanese page for details.