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The UCF High School Programming Tournament: Online Edition!

This year the online contest for individual high school students returns! This contest will be held on Saturday, February 4, 2012 from 1 to 5pm (EST). Students, if you are interested in competing, please watch this web site as we will reveal more information as the date gets closer. You can also contact Dr. Ali Orooji by phone at 407-823-5660 or by our contact form. We welcome as many people as we can handle! You do not need to be from Florida to participate in our online competition!

Format

With the exceptions noted below, most aspects of the Online Edition will follow the same format as the annual team-based UCF High School Programming Tournament, which is based on the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.

Each person will compete individually and must be a high school student.

Contestants are given approximately eight programming problems to solve within four hours. The contestant solving the most problems wins. Ties are broken based on the time taken to solve /the problems, and number of attempts. There is no penalty assessed for problems not solved.

Solution programs must be written in C, C++, or Java. Although it is necessary that each contestant be familiar with either C, C++, or Java, the emphasis of the contest is on problem solving rather than on the specific details of the language.

We will place additional information here on how to submit your solution programs and how statements of ambiguity will be handled.

Contest Programming Environments

You will need an internet-connected computer at your own location, with any reasonably current Java or C/C++ compiler/environment installed. The judges will compile and run your code using Java JDK 1.6.0_20 and gcc/g++ 4.5.1 command-line tools. We don't expect many problems with compiler compatibility, but we welcome questions prior to the contest about testing your chosen environment.

For all problems, solution programs must read input from "standard input" (stdin for C, cin for C++ and System.in for Java) and output to "standard output" (stdout for C, cout for C++, and System.out for Java). The programs must not display prompts such as "Enter a value" or "Press a key to continue" nor attempt to use graphical/window output.

Prizes

There will be no tangible prizes, but the top three will be recognized on our web site and you will gain bragging rights!

Registration

To register (each student should register separately), go to ucfhsptonline2012.eventbrite.com. We will contact you as the event gets closer in time (with information on how the problems will be distributed, submissions made, etc.). Registration closes on January 27, 2012!

Schedule

Practice sessions will be run on January 28, 2012 from 1-5pm ET and on February 1, 2012 from 6-10pm ET. Both sessions will use the same problems so you only need participate in one (although you are welcome at both!). You do not need to participate the entire time although completing a few problems would be useful for seeing how the system will work, figure out any strange issues that may occur, etc.

The actual competition will run on February 4, 2012 from 1-5pm ET. The site will open for logging in one hour ahead of time.

Login information for both practice sessions and the actual competition will be the same and will be e-mailed on Wednesday, January 25, 2012 or within 24 hours of registration (if you register after that date).