Preliminary Electronic Contest

Welcome to the testing round of the 11th BME International 24-hour Programming Contest!

This document is the problem set for the Preliminary Electronic Contest to be held on February 12th, 2011.

The PreEC provides a way for teams to familiarize themselves with our submission system and the general atmosphere of the competition. Whether teams participate in this testing round or not, or whatever results they achieve, will not have any consequences later in the competition.

The four problems we selected for the PreEC may not be the kind of problems you would consider especially challenging, however they provide some clues about the Electronic Contest - the required tools, the usage of our submission system and so on.

Rules

The Preliminary Electronic Contest contains four problems. You have all the time in the world to solve them, but we take submissions from 9:00 to 21:00 CET. The inputs of the problems can be found in a zip file that you have probably already downloaded from the website. Each problem will have exactly 10 test cases.

You can use any platform or programming language to solve the problems. We are interested only in the output files, you don't need to upload the source code of the programs that solved them. Once you are done, you can upload your output files via the submission site: http://ch24.org/sub. Your solutions will be evaluated on-line.

There are two major problem types:

Note that points are awarded per output file and not per problem. If your solution only works for some of the input files, you will still be awarded points for the correct output files. A single output file however is either correct or wrong - partially correct output files are not worth any points.

Additional information for non-scaled problems:

Be quick about uploading the output files, because the scores awarded for every output file decrease with time. Uploading it just before the end of the contest is worth 70% of the maximum points achievable for the test case. During the contest its value decreases linearly with time. However you should also be careful with uploading solutions. Uploading an incorrect solution is worth -5 points. This penalty is additive, if you upload more incorrect solutions, you will receive it multiple times. For some problems, we distinguish format errors (unparsable outputs) from incorrect outputs, and the former will not be penalised.

Please note that there is no point in uploading another solution for an already solved testcase because you cannot achieve more points with it. Therefore the system will not register additional uploads for solved testcases.

Additional information for scaled problems:

In this case there will be no penalty for uploading a solution later, so you are able to achieve the maximum amount of points by submitting in the very last minute - if you beat the other teams' solutions, that is.

Scores to scaled problems are recalculated occasionally (every few minutes). Your points may decrease in time (when another team submits a better solution than yours).

Please be aware that only your last submission is considered - not your best one.

Good luck and have fun!

About the Submission site

The location of the submission site is:

http://ch24.org/sub

You will be able to log in to the submission site with your registered team name and password. After login you can access three main views:

Team Status

You can see your team's status here, with all your submissions and the points received for them.

Submit

This is where you can post your solution files. You can upload multiple output files for multiple problems with a single submit. The naming of the output files must strictly match the following format: X99.out - where X is the problem's character code followed by a number (1 or 2 digits) identifying the test case.

Scores

Here you can see the current standings of the contest. This will not be available in the last hour.

Contact

You should subscribe to the public mailing list at http://lists.ch24.org to receive announcements and to be able to send feedback. The address of the list is ch24@ch24.org.

During the contest we will be available on IRC on the irc.ch24.org server (using the default port, 6667). For general discussion about the contest use the #challenge24 channel, for problem specific discussion use #p, #q, #r, #s channels.