UW-Madison ICPC Tryout Contest

Updated on 9/9/2018 5pm CDT

We will hold '18 Fall UW-Madison ICPC Team Tryout Contest on Sunday 9/9 2pm - 5pm at CS 1350. The purpose of the event is to give you some sense of the ICPC style contest and to have fun solving algorithmic puzzles.

The room is one of the CS lab rooms. There are computers with a Windows system and some common IDEs installed.

The contest will be hosted on codeforces (CF), so you will be able to attend online. However, we encourage you to come and attend on-site together with us. It will be more fun!

• The contest is end. Final standing is here.
  • First place (AK): Dung Viet Bui (bvd)
  • Second place (AK): Bryan Jin (divide_by_zero)
  • Third palce: Aditya Kumar Akash (adityaakash)
• Let us know how you liked it through this short survey.

How to join

Step 1: Register in Codeforces
Just click on the “Register” button on codeforces to register.

Step 2: Join the group
Join the group called UW-Madison Competitive Programmers. After the group manager’s^[1] confirmation, you will be able to see the contest within “contests” tab.

Optional: Team forming
For first-time ICPC players, you are welcome to form a team of at most 3 people before you register for the contest. To form a team, go to your own profile, find the ‘team’ tag, and create a team! Then you can register as a team member for the contest.
For experienced players, you are encouraged to work alone on the problem set to make it more of a challenge! You can do that by directly registering as an individual.

Step 3: Join the contest
You need to register for the contest, either as individual or as a team member, before you can actually attend and start solving.

About the contest

How many problems? How much time?
There will be 6 problems within 3 hours.

Language?
The host system we are using actually supports more language than the official ones. You can code in any of them for this one, but we suggest you stick to the officially supported languages: C/C++, Java, and Python.

Difficulty?
The level of difficulty will be comparable to our regional contest, and we try to make the experience very similar to the official one.

What if I don’t do well…
Note this tryout is different from the placement test, which is planned to happen by the end of September. So your performance will not be taken into account for anything. This contest is just here to help you get a sense of what it feels like to do an ICPC style programming competition.

So feel free to come and find your future teammates!

Before the contest

• Be sure to register as a user at CF, and register to the contest. Refer to How to join section.
• Prepare your programming environment. We recommend to use the same version of the compiler as the contest judge.
• You may want to familiarize yourself with the submission system at CF. You can do this by solving the watermelon problem.

During the contest

• Use the built-in Q&A system to ask questions.
• You may want to read the tips below if you are new to ICPC or programming contests in general.

After the contest

• There will be a short debriefing and hopefully some .
• We will discuss the problems in our next weekly meeting on Thursday.
• Please let us know about your experience and help us hold better event in the future by taking part in this short experience survey.

Tips

If you’ve never participated in ICPC or another programming contest before, here are some things that may be good to know.

Strategy-wise

• The problems are not necessarily arranged in increasing difficulty. Actually, they may come in any order. Sometimes, the problem setter may try to deceive you regarding the difficulty, just to make it more fun!
• Skim through all the questions first and start with the easiest ones.
• In the middle of the contest, you may want to check the scoreboard to have a grasp of the problem difficulties.
• Infer the complexity of the desired algorithm from the spatial/temporal limitations.
• As this time it’s a tryout, we’ll probably release some hints after 20-30 min after start if some of you seem really stuck.
• Run through small cases manually to get inspired.
• Avoid dwelling on one question and one method. Read again, try different algorithms, or temporarily skip it. The diffuse mode of your brain will work on it unconsciously.
• Avoid submitting too many times, because every incorrect submission will cause a 20-minute penalty.

Programming-wise

• For our on-site practice contests, you can arrive a bit earlier to set up your programming environment. In official competitions, you may have to configure the IDEs after the competition starts, so familiarize yourself with this procedure.
• Test with marginal cases before submission. Never debug through submissions.
• Be aware of the range of different data types. Say, for C/C++, int is at most $2^{31} - 1 \approx 2\times10^{9}$ and long long can be up to $2^{63} - 1 \approx 9\times10^{18}$.
• You may want to know how to input from / output to the screen. Some good techs to know include: deal with end-of-file (EOF), read line as a string, sccanf/printf vs cin/cout and etc.
• Massive IO (Important not for this contest but for future contests):
  • C++: C-style IO (scanf/printf) instead of C++ streams (cin/cout).
  • Java: BufferedReader/BufferedWriter instead of Scanner/System.out.print.

More tips will be covered later in the weekly meetings or online.

And we will be there. You can always ask us for help.

Good luck and have fun!

Event Staff

Event CEO & CTO: Ziyi Zhang^[1:1]
Organizer: Jinman Zhao^[2]
Problem designer: Ziyi Zhang, Jinman Zhao
Solution writer: Ziyi Zhang (C++), Jinman Zhao (Python), Sichao Yang^[3] (C, Java)
Quality assurance: Dieter van Melkebeek, Changtian Sun, Zhicheng Cai
Logistic assistant: Akhil Guliani

Many thanks to everyone who made this happen!