Rules and Procedures

Contestants

For this competition, each contestant must simply be a UCF student.  No specific major is necessary!  Note that eligibility for the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) itself has a number of rules (you can see these rules in the ICPC Eligibility Tree). For new team members, the most important aspect is that you must be taking at least a half-time load of classes. Note that some exceptions are granted by the ICPC so please check with us if you have any questions.

Conduct of the Tournament

• Six or more problems will be posed at the beginning of the contest.

• Contestants will be given five hours to solve the problems. The Contest Coordinators have the power to extend the contest under unforeseen circumstances.

• Contestants may bring any materials to the contest except computing devices (including calculators), machine readable media, or devices requiring a wall outlet. While cell phones are not explicitly disallowed, the expectation is that they are not to be used during the tournament except for emergency communications.

• Contestants may work on the problems in any order.

• A contestant may make submissions to the judges at any time during the contest. Judged runs are made on data created by the judges to test the correctness of the program. These are done on the judges' computer. After a judged run, the contestant will receive only a message with one of the following responses from the judges:

Correct
Compile-Time Error
Run-Time Error
Read from File
Time-Limit Exceeded
Output to Screen
Wrong Answer
Too Much Output
Incorrect Output Format
Incomplete Output

• These responses are explained in Judged Runs and Responses.

• The judges will not entertain questions about any problem. If a contestant feels that a problem is stated ambiguously and requires clarification, s/he may submit a statement of ambiguity to the judges. The statement of ambiguity will be answered if the judges agree that a clarification is required. The statement and the answer will be provided to all teams if the judges deem it necessary. The judges may refuse to answer any statement of ambiguity.

• Contestants must not access the judging system in any way that is designed to maliciously degrade the performance of the system, or to disturb the work of the judges or other contestants. Contestants are expected to obey federal and state computer laws.

• Contestants may not discuss the contest problems with anybody except the contest staff.

• The Contest Coordinators have the power to deal with any infraction of the above rules through penalty or disqualification, at their discretion.

Scoring

The contestant which has had the most problems judged correct at the end of the contest is declared the winner. If more than one contestant has solved the same number of problems, the winner is the one with the fewest penalty points.

• Penalty points are assessed for solved problems.
  • One penalty point is assessed for each minute from the beginning of the contest until the problem was solved.
  • Twenty penalty points are assessed for each judged run except one "correct" submission (note that multiple correct submissions on a problem receive a penalty).

• No penalty points are assessed for any problem which was not solved.

• For more clarification, see the Example of Scoring.

• The Contest Coordinators reserve the right to adjust penalty points to allow for unforeseen circumstances.

• The score will be "frozen" in the final hour (meaning that score updates will not be publicly shown) in order to preserve suspense for the end of the competition.

Awards and Prizes

There are no official prizes (just bragging rights!). However, the results are used in forming the UCF Programming Team for the year.