ACM Boston Preliminary (BOSPRE 2017)
Programming Contest Rules
- The rules for BOSPRE are the
Northeast North America Regional Rules
unless specified otherwise in the following.
- For the 3 easiest problems, in the event of an incorrect
solution the autojudge will provide feedback by email of
the first failed test case input and output.
- You are permitted to use the web during the contest,
BUT ONLY to find information you need to solve contest
problems (least you overload the WiFi or internet services).
You are also permitted to bring and use printed materials.
Web pages should be treated as if you had printed them before
you came to the contest and brought the printout with you.
See more detailed rules below.
(Note that Regional and World Final Contests only allow you
to bring and use a 25 page
Team Reference Document and prohibit web access.)
- There is no time penalty for an incorrect solution.
(Note that Regional and World Final Contests have a 20 minute time
penalty for each incorrect submission.)
- Output Format Errors will be graded Incorrect Output (aka Wrong Answer)
unless they involve only spacing and capitalization.
- All work is done on a contest server which is a very large
computer in the cloud. A few days before the contest teams
are given their contest accounts and team coaches are given
passwords to these accounts. A team may be asked to provide its
own computer (i.e., laptop) to be used to access these accounts during
the contest. In this case the team should bring a backup computer
if possible.
- Each team must have a team leader who is responsible
for enforcing the following:
- During the contest the team may use only one computer to
access their account or the web.
- The team may NOT upload files from this computer to their
team account on the contest server. A team may NOT cut
and paste any portion of such a file to their terminal.
- The team's backup computer is turned off.
- The team may NOT access the web from their server account.
- The team may NOT access videos on the web (because they
would load the WIFI).
- The team may NOT print web pages (to avoid overloading
the printer).
- The team may cut and paste between web pages and their
terminal provided that
- the amount transfered is limited to a faction of
a web page, and
- repeated transfers are not used to disguise a
single larger transfer.
These rules are also monitored by the host site management.
- To allow teams unfamiliar with the programming
environment to get up to speed,
there is a set of
practice problems in addition to the regular contest problems.
Practice problems are just like regular contest problems EXCEPT:
- they the DO NOT COUNT in the contest scoring
- they DO NOT appear on the regular scoreboard
- they may be done DURING OR BEFORE the contest
- host site management can give help on ANY aspect of a PRACTICE
problem, including details of algorithm design and code
See the
Practice Problems Help File
for details.
- The programming environment is the
World Finals Programming Environment, except that all work
is done on a central server and:
- Makefile, sample.in, and sample.test files are provided for testing.
- The ONLY editors are vi/vim, nano, gedit, and emacs.
- NO IDE's are provided (they are too slow over internet).
- C is compiled with -g and -Dinline=static instead of -O2.
- C++ is compiled with -g and -std=gnu++11 instead of -O2
and -std=gnu++14. C++ files must have .cc extension.
- JAVA is executed with the -ea flag added.
- Python2 is used for both compilation and interpretation of PYTHON.
- The operating system is CentOS 7 instead of UBUNTU.
- Problem scores are first computed by the autojudge. Correct scores are
considered final, while incorrect scores are
confirmed by the human judge, who may change the score if there
is an error in scoring.
Scores might also change if a systemic scoring error is
discovered and all submissions for a particular problem
are re-scored. Completely Correct scores might be changed to
incorrect during systemic re-scoring, but this is extremely unusual
and has never happened
during a BOSPRE contest.
By rule, a Completely Correct score will NOT BE CHANGED during the last
2 hours of the contest.
The time of a submission is NOT adjusted if it is re-scored.
Scoring changes are reported to teams via email, and a summary of
scores is reported on the scoreboard.
Scoring errors are considered to be `luck of the contest events',
and it is the responsibility of the judge to ensure that they
are rare and free of intentional bias.
- See Help Files for more details.