ACM Boston Preliminary (BOSPRE 2018)
Programming Contest Rules
Conduct
- TEAM LEADER: 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 contest account, and at most one separate
computer to browse the web.
- The team may NOT browse the web from the computer they
use to access their contest account.
- The team may NOT upload or download files into their
contest account, either directly, or by using cut-and-paste.
- The team may NOT access videos on the web (to avoid overloading
the WIFI).
- The team may NOT print web pages (to avoid overloading
the printer).
These rules are also monitored by the host site management.
- PRINTED MATERIALS:
Teams are permitted to bring and use printed materials.
- NOTE ON REGIONAL CONTEST DIFFERENCES:
Regional and World Final Contests only allow you
to bring and use a 25 page
Team Reference Document and prohibit internet access.
Computers
- LAPTOPS: You must use your own laptops during the contest.
You may bring mice and keyboards to attach to your laptops,
but you may NOT bring displays (as some teams travel by
subway and cannot easily carry a display).
- TERMINAL:
The laptop you use to access your contest account (your `terminal')
CANNOT be used for ANY other internet access.
- BROWSING WEB:
You may use a SECOND laptop during the contest to browse the web.
This laptop MUST NOT be used to access the contest account.
You should use the second laptop ONLY to find information you
need to solve contest problems, least you overload the WiFi
or internet services. You SHOULD NOT print web pages, least
you overload the printer.
- BOSPRE USB: You SHOULD use the
BOSPRE USB `live usb' flash drive operating system
for both your terminal and web browsing laptops.
-
Its up to your coach whether or not you are REQUIRED to use
BOSPRE USB.
Coaches whose schools are likely to qualify for regionals
are strongly encouraged to use BOSPRE USB.
-
If BOSPRE USB does not work for you, you may use your own
software on your laptop (be prepared), but after the contest
help us fix BOSPRE USB so it will work for everyone.
Programming Environment
- CONTEST SERVER AND ACCOUNTS:
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. Teams should verify that their
laptops can access these accounts BEFORE the teams come to BOSPRE.
- PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT: 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.
Scoring
- JUDGE'S TEST CASE FEEDBACK:
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.
- NO TIME PENALTY: 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.)
- FORMAT ERRORS SCORED AS INCORRECT OUTPUT:
Output Format Errors will be scored as
Incorrect Output (aka Wrong Answer)
unless they involve only spacing and capitalization.
- PRACTICE PROBLEMS: 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.
- SCORING DETAILS:
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 for a re-scored problem.
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.