ICPC Info, Mid-Atlantic Region 2020
This page has details for the 2020 ICPC Regional Contest (Mid-Atlantic),
which waswill be held virtually on 2021-Mar-06 (Sat).
The contest itself will be 14:00–19:00 (with a practice-run beforehand).
This information augments the standard, year-over-year information.
Thank you for helping make the contest successful!
Some (but perhaps not all) of the judging data and solutions
may be released to coaches about 1 week after end of contest
(coaches will be notifed by email).
Critical Info
During the contest
- mausa20.kattis.com:
log in with your existing kattis account (using the email you used for ICPC registration);
see kattis login instructions.
- Questions on contest-day? Via kattis-clarification (preferred),
or email mausa20.help AT gmail.com.
- Problem set on mausa20.kattis.com,
but in case of difficulties, there will be a problem-set mirror
will go live 0–5min after contest start.
- During the contest, periodically look for (a) any
General Clarifications
,
and
(b) your email for messages starting with [ICPC]
.
- Please DO NOT MENTION/DISCUSS/POST ANY PROBLEMS ON THE WEB
(incl. social media, public github repos, …)
until after 19:00!, thanks.
- If necessary, refer to
the Contest Guide,
with the nitty-gritty of how problems are submitted, timed, and judged.
- Feel free to send a selfie to mausa20.help AT gmail.com,
if you don't mind it perhaps being used to promote future contests.
Be sure to sneak in your school's logo in a way they can't crop out!
Before the contest
- Make sure you are able to log on to mausa20.kattis.com.
The problems won't be visible yet,
but if the upper-right says
spectator
or login
,
you are not logged in with the right account!
See kattis login instructions.
- Decide how your team will communicate and share files
(e.g. via their own (non-public) discord channel or zoom room,
or perhaps sitting in the same room (appropriately masked and distanced)).
- Read through the rules below.
- Bookmark www.radford.edu/acm/midatl .
- Gather any snacks/meals/energy-food you'll want to have on-hand during the contest.
Read over the Contest Guide,
with the nitty-gritty of how problems are submitted, timed, and judged.-
If inspired, you can order a contest t-shirt ($15).
(Link will stay open only through Sun. eve, I'm told.)
Delivery will take a few weeks.
Routine Info
Schedule
2021-Mar-06;
all times Eastern.
We are thankful for our ICPC global sponsors for helping make this contest possible!
Here is some more info about them.
We are also deeply thankful for the work of all the volunteers
who helped make today's contest possible -- You know who you are!
Your work in a cause you believe in is appreciated by many.
Rules synopsis
The basic rules for participation in this year's contest are:
- The competition will be run under the honor system, according to academic standards of conduct.
- During the competition, teams may communicate about the contest only with their team members and contest officials.
Teams may not communicate about the contest with coaches, contestants on other teams, family members, etc.
- Exactly one workstation (computer) allowed per team member.
This differs from the usual on-site competition with a limitation of one workstation per team.
Additionally, phones, tablets, and watches are allowed.
- Teams are permitted to use most internet and electronic resources,
e.g. wikipedia.org, stackoverflow.com, etc..
This differs from the usual on-site competition.
The two exceptions are:
- No live people: No posting/asking questions on discussion boards and the like.
You may only communicate with your own team-members.
- No resources that aren't freely available on the web:
Teams may not use fee-based, institution specific, or restricted subscription-based resources,
such as restricted access journals, upgraded websites requiring payments, etc..
Physical resources (books, notes) are also acceptable, as usual.
- Teams may build up a library of routines and code prior to the contest.
This differs from the on-site competition where every team starts with an empty home directory.
- Teams should cite any submitted code that they copied from somewhere on the day of the contest.
A URL suffices, as does a quick note about a textbook (e.g.
Sedgewick Alg's in C++
),
starting within the first 10 lines of their solution.
(Ideally, citations to code prepared in advance would also cite its source,
but we realize that contestants might have existing prepared-code-libraries without citation.)
No citations are needed for examples in official language APIs, nor for
non-contest-problem-specific, routine code which is at most two typical lines
(e.g. code found in response to searching convert file to string in Java
).
Note that if a team is found to have used unauthorized code,
but they cite it honestly (without intent of hiding or obscuring the code's source),
the worst that will likely happen is that solutions for that particular problem won't be counted.
However, without citation, the team may be disqualified from the contest,
and the matter might be referred to their school's honor-council.
- Post-contest interviews: we reserve the right to contact teams after the contest,
asking them to discuss their solution to certain problems.
Should any post-contest verification be needed, the staff will request it via email
to the team members and coach within 96hrs after the end of the contest.
We know that most all students participating in the contest are honest and
are wanting to submit code they have fairly written themselves.
The intent of these rules is not to make people nervous,
but to (a) to be clear to everybody what is and isn't allowed,
and (b) ensure that all can be confident of the contest outcome.
- Should somebody find a site containing a solution to any of the contest's current problems,
notify mausa20.help AT gmail.com immediately.
The contest is also subject to the
standard Regional Contest rules
(but where they conflict, this page takes precedence).
We ask for your understanding, as we all work together to run this annual contest
very differently from previous years; thank you!
- Kattis uses the ICPC registration email address,
to identify if you have an existing account in Kattis.
- If you did not already have a Kattis account associated with your ICPC registration email address,
then kattis created one for you, and sent you an email with their new credentials.
You should use that (new) account, even if you have other Kattis accounts.
Only the new account is associated with the contest.
- If you already had a Kattis account associated with your ICPC registration email address,
then you should just use that account.
Again, using another account will not work and is a common source of error.
In this case, you received no email about new credentials from Kattis
(because you already had credentials that match their ICPC registration email address).
- The team memberships are handled in the way you'd expect.
Each person is assigned to their team (so: multiple individual accounts per team).
- If you log in and see "Spectator" in the top-right corner,
then you are not logged in with the incorrect account.
- If you can't log in (but know the ICPC registration email),
click
I forgot my password
.
- If you don't know your ICPC registration email login/email,
mail mausa20.help AT gmail.com; include your team-name, coach, and school.
- If your campus is blocking mausa20.kattis.com (as a
new
domain, and hence suspicious):
- Quickest: Try accessing the site from off-campus / off-VPN.
- Perhaps set up a tethered mobile hotspot? (kattis is low-bandwidth.)
- Have your teammates submit the file.
- Email your code-files to your phone, and submit via cellular (turning off wireless)? (Yech!)
- email mausa20.help AT gmail.com, giving us your coach's email, and we'll
contact your coach so they can contact your campus IT.
- In the mean time, you can see and develop the problems via the problem-set mirror.
Try the above even if you are getting a
NET::ERR_CERT_INVALID
;
a bug in openDNS sometimes gives that error-message
even though it's simply a new (suspicious) site.
This is a tough problem, since root cause is fixable by neither you nor us!
Communication during contest
It's not so easy as flagging down a runner, this year!
Communicating to contest staff
As mentioned at top,
the preferred method is to use the kattis system's clarification request
.
If you are unable to access kattis,
you can send email to mausa20.help AT gmail.com.
Communications from contest staff
- If we need to communicate to everybody (hopefully we won't!),
contest staff will post a "general clarification", in kattis,
so please keep your eye open for those.
- In the unlikely event that
we need to contact an individual or team, we will send email.
So please check your email periodically!
The subject line will start with
[ICPC]
, and may be from an address you don't recognize.
System Requirements
- Any compilers, editors, IDEs, and other tools you will need.
(C/C++, Java, python3, Kotlin).
- A browser capable of accessing mausa20.kattis.com.
Be sure you can log in to that site;
the upper-right corner should not say spectator
.
See kattis login instructions.
- Zoom (for opening/closing ceremonies; via browser is okay).
Registration
Registration ended Feb.19.
T-shirts are
available for individual order ($15+tax).
If ordered by Jan.22, they will arrive (at whatever address) by the contest-date.
They can be ordered later (up to the day of the contest), but may take 4-6 weeks to arrive.
Related contests
A strong finish in the Mid-Atlantic Regional contest
will lead to an invitation to the
North American Divisional Contest (NADC
), 2021-Apr-22.
Of the 150 teams that will be invited,
at least
16 will be from the Mid-Atlantic region.
Up to two teams from the same school can advance to the NADC.
The NADC will be virtual, with proctoring.
The NADC, in turn, qualifies teams for
the North American Championship (physical, at most one team per school).
The contests culminate in the
World Finals in Moscow 2021-…Jun??.
radford.edu