November 15, 2008 NCNA Rules
The rules presented here are ancillary to the general rules of the ACM Regional
Programming Contests (which can be found at the ACM ICPC web site). As such, they
provide additional rules, exceptions, and other information pertaining specifically to the
North Central North America regional contest. Changes from the previous region
specific rules are shown in red (and double underlined in the printed document).
Participants, Sites, and Schedule
1. The ACM North Central North America (NCNA) Regional Programming Contest
will be held at several satellite sites distributed throughout the region. The contest
will be held on Saturday, November 15, 2008. Contestants will have a period of
five hours (12:30 PM to 5:30 PM CST) in which to solve the six or more posed
programming problems.
2. Two meetings will take place at 10:30 AM CST at each Site. At one of these
meetings, those team coaches in attendance will meet to open the sealed package
containing the contest problems, the judge's data, and additional specific judging
information. This meeting will be supervised by the Site head judge. The team
coaches will serve as judges, and will keep (or supervise the keeping of) the local
contest records. Schools without a team coach in attendance will have no input in
the contest judging decisions; these teams agree to be bound by the judging
decisions of the team coaches attending.
3. At the other 10:30 AM meeting the Site staff will be introduced to the teams, and
the teams will be allowed to become familiar with the contest environment, site
specific policies and procedures, printing procedures, and policies regarding from
where their judged runs are to read data and where their judged runs are to
produce output. Teams that do not attend the 10:30 AM meeting are still obligated
to be judged using procedures described in that meeting.
4. Teams and their coaches are to remain separated from the beginning of the 10:30
AM meetings until the end of the contest.
5. Contestants are drawn from the following geographical region: Minnesota,
Wisconsin, Western Ontario, Manitoba, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota,
Nebraska, and Kansas. Teams from outside this region may petition the Director
of North American Contests for permission to compete in the North Central North
America contest.
6. All team members must attend all contest activities as specified by the Regional
Director.
7. Each school may register multiple teams for the Regional Contest. These
registrations must be made by team coaches using the ACM ICPC web
registration system. A registered team is not eligible to compete until the regional
contest director has accepted the team in the web registration system. In order to
obtain a contest roster which represents as many different schools as possible, and
thus potentially increase the number of teams advancing from the region to the
world finals, the regional contest director will accept, no later than seven (7) days
before the contest, at least one team from each school registered at a site.
Additional team registrations will be accepted for a site in first-come, first-served
order. Acceptance of teams is contingent on the availability of sufficient
resources at the satellite site where the teams are registered. Schools hosting a
satellite site will be given first preference for the acceptance of two teams at their
own satellite site.
8. Each team's coach must fully register teams in the ICPC Registration System. A
team is not eligible to compete in the regional contest until the regional contest
director has accepted the team in the web registration system (see rule 7, above).
Teams failing to comply with any of these requirements will be ruled ineligible to
compete. Only registered reserves may be substituted for contestants. Such
substitutions must be entered in the ICPC Registration System by the regional
contest directory before the contest begins.
9. A fee of US$50 will be charged to teams registering after October 27, 2008.
Personnel
1. The Site Director is responsible for all local contest arrangements, including the
solicitation of on-site volunteers, procurement of rooms and equipment (including
backup systems), and so forth. He or she may not serve as a contest judge. The
Site Director is responsible for appointing a Head Judge for the contest site, and
will inspect the materials accompanying a team to the contest area to ensure that
all items comply with the rules stated in the Contest Procedures section. The Site
Director will conduct a meeting with the contestants prior to the start of the
contest to reiterate the contest procedures and explain any site-specific policies,
and will distribute the official contest results to all teams that participated at their
site.
2. The Site Head Judge is responsible for coordinating all aspects of the local
judging effort. He or she will conduct a meeting with the team coaches prior to
the contest to officially open the contest materials and discuss the problems. Any
suspected ambiguities or errors must be reported to the Regional Contest director
for an immediate ruling. If necessary, the Regional Contest director will
disseminate an appropriate clarification to all sites. The Site Head Judge will
explain the judging procedures and work with the team coaches to distribute the
contest judging and record-keeping responsibilities.
Conduct of Contest
1. At least six problems will be posed.
2. Each Site will establish its own policy regarding the manipulation of the contest
data files. Typically, teams will read their own test input files from the same disk
that contains the program source. For judging purposes, however, all input
operations must read the judges' private data file (on a hard drive, for example).
Therefore, contestants may be required to modify their programs when they are
submitted for judging. Output will typically be displayed on the screen or written
to a new data file. Each contestant is responsible for understanding the policy in
effect at the site where they compete. A general clarification stating the procedure
in effect at each site will be issued during the contestant's meeting.
3. Once the contest begins, all interaction between the teams and the judges will be
limited to written communication on Dialogue Request forms. This includes
requests for clarification, reports of malfunctioning equipment, and so forth.
Team members must not solicit or accept communication from any person not on
their team except the Satellite Site Director and his/her assistant(s). The Site
Director and assistant(s) will be introduced at the 10:30 AM team meeting, and
will be appropriately identified during the contest.
4. Solutions to problems submitted for judging are called runs. Each run is judged as
accepted or rejected, and the team is notified of the results. Rejected runs will be
marked with one of the following reasons: run-time error, time-limit exceeded,
wrong answer, or presentation error.
5. A team's coach may request substitution of a registered reserve for a contestant
before the contest begins. This request must be communicated to the regional
contest director, accepted, and entered in the ICPC Registration System before the
contest begins.
6. The Site Director, the Site Head Judge, and the pool of team coaches present
serve as the final authority for resolving all local contest matters. Contest issues
which may have implications beyond the local site must be referred to the
Regional Contest Director immediately for resolution.
7. Each team must have a faculty advisor.
8. The faculty advisor is responsible for registering the team to compete at a Site and
for certifying that the team meets all eligibility requirements as set forth in these
rules and the General Regional Contest Rules. The faculty advisor may choose to
designate a different individual to serve as the team representative and point of
contact; this representative is called the team coach. The faculty advisor may
designate him/herself as the team coach. If two or more teams from the same
institution are registered for the contest, a single team coach will suffice.
9. A public message board will be maintained throughout the contest period. Team
members are to check this board periodically for messages from the contest
administration and interim contest results.
10. A team may submit a claim of ambiguity or error in a problem statement. If the
judges determine that an error or ambiguity exists, the Dialogue Request form
with an appropriate response will be posted on the public message board.
11. Dialogue Requests which only affect a particular team will be returned directly to
the team concerned.
12. Each run to be judged is submitted using the mechanism specified by the Site
Director. Such mechanism will ensure the timely and secure delivery of runs to
the judges. The submission will contain: a single program source file (under the
name given in the problem statement) and be marked with the time of submission
and the identification of the submitting team. The judges will run the submitted
program against their test data and either accept the run as correct, or return a
reason for its rejection. Correct runs will result in the submitting team receiving
an Accepted Run notification which will minimally inform the team of the time
consumed by their solution. The source code for accepted runs will not be
returned. Rejected runs will result in the team being notified of such failure, and
will indicate one of the following messages: run-time error, time-limit exceeded,
wrong answer, or presentation error. Rejection reasons are not guaranteed to be
complete (nor sufficient) to identify the actual source of the error. Normally, only
the first observed error will be noted by the judges for a rejected run.
13. No penalties will be assessed for obtaining printed listings during the contest.
Local procedures for obtaining a listing will be explained by the Site Director
during the meeting with contestants.
14. It is the responsibility of the contestants to maintain adequate backup copies of
their work.
15. The contest period will end promptly at 5:30 PM. Final submissions must reach
the judges prior to 5:30 PM.
Scoring
1. The Contest Judges are solely responsible for accepting or rejecting submitted
runs. In consultation with the Contest Judges, the Chief Judge is responsible for
determining the winners of the Contest Finals. They are empowered to adjust for
or adjudicate unforeseen events and conditions. Their decisions are final.
2. All contest results announced immediately following the contest will be marked
Unofficial pending adjudication of any appeals as prescribed in the general rules.
If no appeals are filed within one business day of the completion of the contest,
the contest results will be marked Official. If one or more appeals are filed, the
results will be marked to indicate appeals are pending . The results will marked
Official only after all appeals have been decided.
3. The team(s) designated to represent the North Central North America Region at
the Contest Finals must come from different schools. Additional teams may be
designated to advance to the Contest Finals if one or more wild-card positions are
assigned to the North Central North America region.
4. Should multiple teams from the same school finish in positions which would
normally qualify them to advance to the Contest Finals, the next highest ranking
team(s) will be selected to advance, subject to Scoring rule 3.
5. Advancement to the Contest Finals is independent of Regional Contest Division.
6. [From the general regional contest rules] Teams are ranked according to the most
problems solved. For the purposes of awards, or in determining qualifier(s) for the
World Finals, 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.
7. Although ties are unlikely, the Regional Contest Director will resolve them by
providing a tie-breaker problem. The tied teams will have one hour in which to
produce a solution to the tie-breaker problem. Tied teams will be ordered on the
length of time required to produce a solution to the tie-breaker problem.
8. Periodically during the contest, each Site Director or Site Head Judge will submit
a report of the standings at the site to the Regional Contest Director. This report
will include identification of each run judged correct, the teams submitting it, and
the time consumed for the run, including penalty minutes (see Scoring rule 6).
This information will be used to update the regional scoreboard which will be
provided on the web to all sites.
Contest Environment
1. The programming languages of the North Central North America Regional
Contest include Pascal, C, C++, and Java. The contest problems will not be
dependent on any features that vary between common implementations of these
languages. Libraries that significantly extend the contest languages beyond their
traditional definitions are not to be used. Each Site Director is authorized to
clarify this point, but contestants may appeal rulings to the Regional Contest
Director. Although Pascal is included as an acceptable language for solutions in
the regional contest, contestants should be aware that it will not be available at the
contest finals. Further, regional contest sites may choose to not provide facilities
for compiling one or more of the regional contest languages at their site. Each Site
Director will make this point clear to teams considering participation at that site.
2. Each team or the team coach is responsible for obtaining information from the
Site Director about the contest environment that will be used by the site at which
they register to compete. Competing at that site implicitly indicates agreement by
the coach and the team members that the environment is acceptable to them. Sites
may require teams to supply some material to be used during the contest (e.g.
labeled floppy disks on which to place solution submissions or complete
computer systems). If such material is required, the Site Director will provide
information about it on request, and will verify the acceptability of the material at
the contest site.
3. The Site will provide each team with the use of one suitably equipped computer
system, access to the contest language environments, and access to the
appropriate manual(s). If necessary, teams competing at a particular satellite site
may be required to provide a copy of the language systems for their use during the
contest. Such software will be subject to examination and qualification or
disqualification by the Site Director.
4. The Site will provide a printing facility that will be shared among the contestants.
No printing will be allowed to printers directly connected to team machines,
although some sites may use networked printing facilities shared by all teams.
5. Each team will use a single computer. All teams will have equivalent computing
equipment. Equivalent is understood to mean that each computer system and the
installed software is sufficient to prepare, test, and submit solutions to the contest
problems in a timely manner without experiencing significant delays that would
not also be experienced using any other contest system in use at the same or a
different contest site. In particular, the term equivalent does not necessarily mean
identical.
Amending the Rules
1. Amendments to these rules may be proposed at any time by individuals or groups
affected by them.
2. Proposed amendments must be presented in the form of specific modifications or
additions to these rules. They must be sent in written form (not e-mail) and
signed by the proposer(s), to the Regional Contest Director.
3. Proposed amendments that conflict with the general regional contest rules will not
be adopted.
4. Proposed amendments received no later than one month after each regional
contest are considered by the NCNA Steering Committee before the date of the
contest finals. The amended NCNA regional rules are presented to the ICPC
International Steering Committee at the contest finals.
5. The region-specific contest rules (as variations to the general regional contest
rules) must be approved by the ICPC International Steering Committee. If
amendments result in disapproval of the NCNA regional rules, the effect of any
amendment causing disapproval will be removed.