Me, The Head Judge

I went to the 1995-1996 Regional competition in September of 95. I really enjoyed the competition there. We did okay for just showing up and going at it, but I thought that future UAF teams would do better if we had the opportunity for a little practice.

So I volunteered to organize and run a local contest on the first Saturday of our Spring Break, March 9th. I think it went great. These web pages are a little write up of my experiences and the way I went about it so that future organizers will have a place to reference what needs to go on.

My personal home pages are: here.

The Rules I used

All questions require you to read the test data from a single input file and to write the results to a single output file. The names of both files are given in the header of the problem. You're not allowed to read or write any other files than the specified ones. Standard input and output are also considered files.

Output must correspond exactly to the provided sample output, including spelling and spacing.

All lines (including the last one) should be terminated with a new-line character, and no whitespace should appear at the end of a line unless explicitly specified. Tabs should never be used.

All programs will be re-compiled prior to testing with the Judge's data. Non-standard libraries may not be used in your solutions. C programs may not include any files except: ctype.h, math.h, stdio.h, stdlib.h, string.h, and strings.h. Pascal programs may use the extended Reset, Rewrite and the Close statement, which are not part of the ISO Pascal standard.

After analyzing a program, the Judge will send one of the following messages:

• Program accepted. Your program passed all tests and is accepted as correct.
• Compile-time error. The Judge was not able to successfully compile your program. The compiler returned an error (not just a warning).
• Run-time error. Your program "crashed", i. e. it exited prematurely due to a run-time error.
• Wrong answer. The program ran through one or more test cases without a run-time error but the output did not match the expected output.
• Presentation error. The output seems to be correct but it is not presented in the required format. Since it is not always easy to distinguish this message from the wrong answer message, it is only sent in obvious cases.
• Time-limit exceeded. Your program did not finish within the given amount of time.
• Contest rule violation. Your program violates a contest rule like calling non-standard libraries.

The CPU time limit for all problems is 3 minutes except when specified otherwise.

Ranking is computed like this:

1. When a solution is submitted, note the time.
2. If the solution works, then the noted time is the "official time" for the team.
3. When another working solution is submitted then the new time becomes the new official time for a solved problem.
4. Whenever a solution is submitted that doesn't work, a penalty is noted for that team.
5. When the contest is over, the start time is subtracted from the official time for each team. The number of penalities x 20 is added to that. This is the team's "overall calculated minutes."
6. The teams are listed in order of number of problems solved, most to least.
If multiple teams have solved the same number of problems, then those teams are listed in order of overall calculated minutes, least to greatest.

The Judge's decisions are to be considered final. No cheating will be tolerated.