Welcome back to the winter semester! We are excited to announce that the First-Year Programming Contest will take place on February 8th, 2025 hosted by us, the CPC!.
This is an algorithmic programming contest which tests concepts similar to those found in job interviews or algorithms classes. If you’re interested in testing out your skills, this is the time! And there’s free pizza, too.
Sign up here!.
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If you are a University of Calgary student who has not completed any 300-level Computer Science or Software Engineering, you are eligible for prizes! (You must also compete on-location.)
For those who are not prize eligible or can’t make it in person but still want to try out the contest, there is an open division on the contest site! You can register on Kattis to compete from anywhere.
The contest is set for Saturday, February 8th, 2025.
In Calgary, the contest will be held in the CPSC lab on the main floor of the Math Science building at the University of Calgary in MS 160.
Individual First-Year students at UofC, meeting the criteria linked to in the "Eligibility" section above may compete for prizes. Individuals not meeting these requirements may participate as guests. The contest is free of charge for entry; lunch will be provided to official competitors at the Calgary location.
The contest itself is a collection of around 10 problems to be solved using C, C++, Java, Python. Rankings are decided first by number of problems solved, and second by time taken to solve.
During the contest, the following rules are in effect:
- The contest platform is generously provided by Kattis. The contest website will be released soon.
- Contestants are prohibited from utilizing any external resources created after the contest begins. This includes, but is not limited to, communication with others (e.g., chatting, consulting individuals, or using LLMs like ChatGPT, Deepseek, Claude, etc.).
- Interaction with other contestants is strictly forbidden. Generally, all external communication is off-limits, except in emergencies where supervised communication is permitted.
- You are allowed to reference pre-existing materials, such as tutorials, textbooks, or code that you have permission to use. This can include your own code.
- Personal devices such as phones or laptops are allowed, provided you do not break the rules above.
- Contest scoring is done through ICPC rules as follows: Contestants are ranked according to the most problems solved. Contestants who solve the same number of problems are ranked first by least “total time” and, if need be, by the earliest time of submission of the last accepted run.
- The “total time” is the sum of the time consumed for each problem solved. The time consumed for a solved problem is the time elapsed from the beginning of the contest to the submission of the first accepted run plus 20 penalty minutes for every previously rejected run for that problem. There is no time consumed for a problem that is not solved.
Any disrespectful behavior towards the Competitive Programming Club, our sponsors or participants can result in disqualification from the event.
If you want a leg up on the competition, there are some preparation opportunities available:
- In Calgary, the Competitive Programming Club meets every Tuesday from 4:00PM - 6:00PM at Science Collaborative Space (ST 142) on the main floor of the science theaters building.
- The UVa Online Judge contains many programming puzzles for self-directed practice
Some time-tested strategies for during the competition:
- Read all the problems, identify the easy ones, and solve them first
- If you're having trouble identifying easy problems, look at the scoreboard to see what others are solving
- Computer time is very valuable, so sketch out your program on paper before coding it (unless it's trivially simple)
- Debugging a program on paper is more effective than sticking print statements everywhere, 99% of the time
- Come up with your own test cases for your program, especially edge cases
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