Semifinal Round Rules

Important changes are in red.

Introduction

• International Collegiate Contest in Informatics and Programming (Contest) is conducted by Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, Federal Agency of Education, Education Committee of the Government of St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg Youth Creativity Palace, St. Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics and Altai State Technical University. Semifinal round of the Contest is conducted by Saratov State University within Southern Subregional competitions of ACM-ICPC, NEERC.

Mission

• Main targets and goals of the Contest are propaganda of scientific knowledge, developing students' interest toward science, support of extracurricular courses, circles, scientific societies, creating optimal conditions for revealing gifted and talented students, their future intellectual growth and professional career, developing of the collaboration skills.

Introduction

• The contest is a two-tiered competition among teams of students representing institutions of higher education. Teams first compete in Semifinal Rounds. The winning teams from each Semifinal Round qualify to advance to the Final Round.

Localization

• The official language of the Contest is English. All written contest materials will be in English.
• The secondary language of the Contest is Russian. All announcements will be made in both Russian and English.
• The Director and the Organizing Committee of the Semifinal Rounds may use as additional languages the languages of the Semifinal Round participants. In this case, all announcements must be made on Russian and each additional language.

Team Composition

• Teams of three students of the same institute of higher education are admitted to participate in the Semifinal Rounds. The Board of directors of the Contest holds right to settle additional requirements towards the Contest participants.
• List of participants of the Semifinal Rounds are formed based on applications from institutes of higher education.
• In case of organizational or technical impossibility to provide participation of all teams that applied, the Semifinal Round Director of Semifinal Round has the right to institute additional requirements towards the Semifinal Round participants, provided that it is approved by the Contest Director.

Conduct of the Contest

• The duration of one round is five hours. The Executive Committee of the Jury holds right to prolong the duration of the round in case of unforeseen circumstances. Should the contest duration be altered, every attempt will be made to notify participants in a timely and uniform manner.
• On the round each team is provided with one personal computer and the set of several problems.
• At least six problems and at most twelve problems will be proposed for solution. As far as possible, problems will avoid dependence on detailed knowledge of a particular applications area or particular contest language.
• Participants' computer configuration and the set of supported programming languages are determined by the Technical Regulations.
• During the competition, participants solve the proposed problems. A solution to a problem is a program written in one of the supported programming languages. The program must not contain auxiliary modules or files. It is allowed to solve different problems using different supported programming languages.
• Submission evaluation is conducted during the competition. Using special software, the teams submit their problems for evaluation. The Executive Committee of the Jury compiles the submitted programs using command line compilers and checks the programs. Participants should include compiler directives in the submitted program file.
• Participants' programs are checked against a set of tests prepared by the Executive Committee of the Jury prior to the round. A program is accepted if it passes all tests.
• Execution time and memory for each program on each test are limited. The programs that exceed these limits are considered inefficient for the given problem. In such case, the test is considered not to be passed, thus the program is rejected. The execution time limit and the accessible memory limit are indicated in the problem statements.
• The submitted program must output the same answers on the same tests, independent of the time of the execution and the program environment. The submitted programs can be executed any number of times and the worst outcome can be counted.
• Participants may bring and use unannotated natural language dictionaries (except electronic ones), blank sheets of paper and instruments for writing only. Contestants may not bring and use any books (except dictionaries), reference manuals, electronic dictionaries, program listings, any machine-readable information (software or data on any kind of storage), computing devices (handhelds, portable PCs, notebooks, calculators), mobile phones or any other communication devices.
• During the round, participants are only allowed to communicate with members of their team, members of the Executive Committee of the Jury and the Technical Committee.
• Participants may use network printer during the contest. The printout will be delivered to the team by representatives of the Technical Committee.
• A team may be disqualified by the Jury for any activity that violates contest Regulations and Rules or jeopardizes the contest such as dislodging extension cords, unauthorized modification of contest equipment, distracting behavior.
• Executive Committee of the Jury holds exclusive right to determine correctness of programs against tests, to evaluate programs, to determine the winners and to disqualify participants. The Executive Committee of the Jury solves questions arising in case of unforeseen events and circumstances.

Computer Configuration

• Each team is supplied with one computer not lower than Pentium III with installed operating system Windows XP or newer, connected to the local network.
• The following software is available to each team:
  • Borland Delphi 7.0;
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition, C/C++;
  • Java 6;
  • Far Manager v1.75;
• Technical Committee holds right to install patches and updates of the listed software.
• Login and password for the operating system are indicated in the Contestant Handbook.

Programming languages

• A solution to a problem is a program written in one of the following programming languages:
  • Java;
  • C;
  • C++;
  • Pascal.
• The jury uses the following commands to compile solutions:

  Compiler	Command Line
  Borland Delphi 7.0	dcc32 -cc <source file>
  Visual C 2005 Express	cl /O2 /TC <source file>
  Visual C++ 2005 Express	cl /O2 /EHs /TP <source file>
  Java 6 SDK Update 16	javac <source file>

Run evaluation

• Solutions to problems that were submitted for judging are called runs. Immediately after submission of any run, the team may continue working on other problems.
• The size of the file with the run may not exceed 256KB.
• Each run is judged as accepted or rejected.
• The run is evaluated by executing it on a secret set of tests, common for all participants. A run is accepted only if it gives correct answers to all tests.
• Runs are not allowed to:
  • access the network;
  • perform any I/O except for opening, closing, reading, and writing of files and standard streams that are explicitly specified in the problem statement;
  • attack system security;
  • execute other programs and create new processes;
  • change file system permissions;
  • work with subdirectories;
  • create or manipulate any GUI resources (windows, dialog boxes, etc.);
  • work with external devices (sound, printer, etc.);
  • do anything else that can stir the evaluating process and the Contest.
• The Contest software uses different methods to reveal violations of the above restrictions.
• Evaluation is performed automatically, that is why a program should respect formats of input and output files described in the problem statement. If not explicitly stated otherwise, all input data are considered to be correct and satisfying all restrictions from the problem statement.
• The memory limit is the maximum amount of memory that a run may utilize.
• The time limit is the maximum execution time per test.
• Time and memory limit for each problem is specified in problem statements. A run is not accepted if the program exceeds these limits.
• As soon as the run is evaluated, a team receives a message with the evaluation results. This message will be shown on the screen and repeated in a hardcopy form. A team is informed whether the run is accepted or not. If the run is rejected the error type and the test number are indicated.
• All tests cases are numbered from one. The first test cases in the test set are the sample tests from the problem statement ordered in the same way as in problem statement. The following tests are ordered with the idea to make easier test cases come before harder ones, although there are no guarantees.
• The possible outcomes are listed in the following table.

  Outcome	Test Number	Comment	Possible Reasons
  Compilation error	No	Executable file was not created after compilation.	Syntax error in the program; wrong file extension or language specified.
  Security violation	Yes	The program tried to violate the contest rules.	Error in the program; purposeful rules violation (the violating team is disqualified in this case).
  Time limit exceeded	Yes	The program exceeds the time limit.	Inefficient solution; error in the program.
  Memory limit exceeded	Yes	The program exceeds the memory limit.	Inefficient solution; error in the program.
  Runtime error	Yes	The program terminates with non-zero exit code or throws an uncaught OS exception.	Runtime error; missing 'return 0' statement in C/C++ main function; 'return (non-zero)' statement in C/C++ main function; 'System.exit(non-zero)' in Java; uncaught exception.
  Presentation error	Yes	The checker cannot check output because it does not match the format specified in the problem statement.	Output format is not correct; no output or wrong output file name.
  Wrong answer	Yes	The answer is not correct.	The algorithm is not correct.
  Accepted	No	Run is accepted.	Program is correct.

• The possible outcomes in the table are listed in their order of priority. For example, if runtime error has occurred, then output is not checked.
• Evaluation process may be stopped several minutes before the end of the Contest. All runs submitted after this moment will be evaluated just after the end of the Contest.
• The Executive Committee of the Jury will publish all submitted runs after the end of the Contest.
• The Executive Committee of the Jury will publish the official test set that was used to evaluate participants' solutions after the end of the Contest.

Clarification Requests

• During the Contest the participants can make Clarification Requests on the problem statements. The clarification request must exactly identify the part of the problem statement that the team considers ambiguous together with the possible interpretations. The Jury encourages participants to use the sample input and output for resolving (apparent) ambiguities.
• A team fills out a Clarification Request form and delivers it to the Jury via the representatives of the Technical Committee.
• The representatives of the Technical Committee deliver blank Clarification Request forms by request.
• When the Executive Committee of the Jury responds to the clarification request, the team receives its Clarification Request form with the answer. If the clarification request is incorrect or the answer is clear from the problem description, the Jury answers No comments. If the Jury agrees that there is an ambiguity or error in the problem statement, a clarification will be issued to all teams.

Practice Session

• During the practice session teams become familiar with the contest environment and the contest software solving sample problems (1-3 simple problems).
• During the practice session teams may not store any source code anywhere except working directory.
• During the practice session teams may not attach any devices to the computer or alter its hardware configuration.
• The results of the practice session are not taken into consideration when determining the Contest standings. However, the Executive Committee of the Jury may disqualify participants from the Contest any team violating the contest rules during the practice session.

Scoring of a Contest

• A team that has solved more problems is placed higher.
• In case of equality in the number of solved problems, the team that has a smaller penalty time is placed higher.
• In case of equality in the number of solved problems and the penalty time, the team that has submitted its last accepted run first, is placed higher.
• The penalty 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 penalty time consumed for a problem that is not solved.
• Scoring of the team is based only on the time of the first accepted run for each problem.

The results of the Semifinal Round

• The winner of the Semifinal Round is a University of the best team.
• The winning team of the Semifinal Round and the leading teams are promoted to the next tier of the Contest. The promotion is held according to quotas set by the Board of Directors of Contest.