Welcome to the Electronic Contest round of the 10th BME International 24-hour Programming Contest!
The Electronic Contest contains 7 problems. You have all the time in the world to solve them, but we take submissions from 10:00 to 15:00 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://x.challenge24thelegend.com/ch24ECServer. 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. Achievable maximal points can differ per test case, these will be indicated at the problem descriptions.
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 -10 points. This penalty is additive, if you upload more incorrect solutions, you will receive it multiple times.
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.
In this case there will be no penalty for uploading a solution later so you are able to achieve maximal points by submitting in the very last minute, if you beat the other teams' solutions.
When you upload a solution for a scaled problem, your summed points will temporarily decrease, until the next scaling occurs, when you will receive your points. Also be aware that your points might decrease in time when another team submits a better solution than yours.
Please be aware that your last submission will count which is not necessarily your best.
For certain problems we provide you a way to get more detailed feedback (a trace or log of the evaluation) for your solution. Unless otherwise stated in the problem description, you will receive a -5 point penalty for each trace you ask. Tracing applies to all solution files if multiple solutions are uploaded in one zip. The tracing penalty is additive as well, so be careful about your uploads when you ask for detailed feedback.
In some cases we define a minimal time gap between two submissions. This means that you are not able to upload two solutions for the same problem within this minimal time gap. This is applied for different test cases of the same problem as well.
Good luck and see you in the finals!
The location of the submission site is:
http://x.challenge24thelegend.com/ch24ECServer
You will be able to log in to the submission site with your registered email address and password. After login you will see your login email and team name in the top right corner. You can submit solutions by logging in with any of your team members' account. You can also use multiple accounts to submit the solutions. The site has five pages:
This page will show the announcements made during the contest. These can be general information, or something connected to a problem (e.g. if an ambiguity is found in the description, we will correct it by posting an Announcement).
You can see your team's status here, with all your submissions and the points received for them. If you click on the points, you will be able to download the file you have submitted. Also this is the page where you can download the detailed logs (traces) of those submissions that you have asked trace for.
This is where you can post your solution files. You can either upload a single output file or a .zip file that may contain multiple outputs. 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.
You may ask for a trace by checking the checkbox here. You can download the detailed log later. Asking for trace is applied to all solutions submitted in the same zip file.
Here you can see the current standings of the contest. This will not be available in the last hour.
Here you can see a summary of the various parameters of each problem
Also you can see the maximum points that you can get for each testcase if you upload a correct solution at that time.
You can subscribe to the public mailing list of the contest by sending an email to ec-subscribe@lists.challenge24thelegend.com. The address of the list is ec@lists.challenge24thelegend.com.
During the contest we will be available on IRC on the irc.challenge24thelegend.com server (using the default port, 6667). For general discussion about the contest use the #challenge24 channel, for problem specific discussion use #a, #b, #c, #d, #e, #f and #g channels.