High School Programming Contest

Contest Logistics & Rules

Virtual Teams

Teams will work remotely and utilize their own communication channel (Discord, Slack, SMS/RCS group chat, audio or video call, etc) for discussing and sharing information, code, and so on with all team members.

Teams may use one computer for each team member. Each team will receive one set of login credentials to the contest system. The contest system purposefully does not allow for two or more simultaneous logins from the same account. The one team account becomes a shared resource that each team must decide how to best utilize.

Contest Flow

At the start of the contest, each team will receive their set of programming problems from their teacher.

Students will write programs to solve as many of these problems as they can. Students within a single team may distribute tasks among themselves and work cooperatively in any way they wish.

As soon as a team believes it has implemented a correct solution to a problem, it should submit their program through the online web-based submission system.

If the team’s program does not correctly solve the specified problem on the first attempt, the team is allowed to submit one or more revised solutions. Beyond simply incrementing the count of problems correctly solved, each correct solution will also receive a “time score” which represents the total elapsed time in minutes since the start of the contest, plus any time penalties for incorrect submissions. The time scores only come into play when there is a tie for a given count of problems correctly solved.

Scoring Example

• Team 1 correcly solves its first problem in 30 minutes on its first submission for that problem. Team 1 now has a score of 1 (correctly-solved problem) with a time score of 30 (minutes).
• 20 minutes later (i.e., 50 minutes into the contest), Team 1 solves a second problem on its first submission. Team 1 now has a score of 2, with a time score of 80 (i.e., 30 + 50).
• Meanwhile, Team 2 submits an incorrect solution for its first problem 15 minutes into the contest. They are able to fix their submission and resubmit it at the 45 minute mark of the contest. Team 2 now has a score of 1, with a time score of 65 (solution at 45, plus a 20-minute penalty for the incorrect submission on the problem).
• If the contest ended at this point, Team 1 would win due to having 2 correctly-solved problems. The time score would only be considered if both teams were tied with 2; in that case, the lowest time score wins.

Contest Problems

Contest problems have a very wide range of difficulty. This years practice contest will have problems from Divisions I, II, & III. Moreover, we try to include at least a couple problems that every team should be able to solve.

Note that all inputs should be read from standard input, and all output should be written to standard output.

Supported Languages and Compilers

Our contest judging system supports the following programming languages. Submitted programs will be compiled using the specified compiler flags below:

Only these languages/versions are supported by the judging system; no other languages/versions shall be used during the contest.