IMPORTANT UPDATE

1) With the new machines being a bit 'not sure' - we are going to let you use your own laptops during the contest. Bring a laptop, with all the coding environment you need for your favourite language

2) We are going to run the contest on http://open.kattis.com
- a) Buy a ticket, so i know about numbers who are competing
- b) Create an account on open.kattis.com, go to the Contests Tab. Join the UoN Week 1 Contest, setup your team :)

3) you can now, therefore, use any of these languages (if you can code them on your laptops :)
- https://open.kattis.com/documentation/techinfo

best

Max

This Competition

An all day programming competition for Computer Science students (or programming-types) in the University of Nottingham. The competition involves trying to solve up to 10 problems in ~5 hours of extreme programming (in teams of up to 3) around a single computer. Solutions can be programmed in either Java or C++, and will be automatically judged. Solutions will have execution time and/or memory constraints. The competition is in the style of the ACM ICPC competition - see more further down below.

To take part, you need sign up as a team of 3 people, or sign up for a individual ticket to be allocated into a team on the day.

Subsequent Competitions:
UKIEPC - on the 24th October 2015, we co-host the UK/IE Programming Contest the first National Preliminary for NWERC (and then ACM International Colleagiate Programming Contest). Its the same format, except you'll be on a scoreboard against other teams around the UK. The best Nottingham team will move forward to NWERC.

NWERC - The NorthWest European Regional Contest (NWERC.eu) of the ACM-ICPC is in November 2015 and we will take the best from Nottingham, based on performance at the UKIEPC. NWERC 2015 will be in Sweden, which will involve a 3 day trip paid by the school. NWERC involves competing against ~90 teams from north west europe.

Prizes:

1st - £50 of Amazon vouchers per person
2nd - £30 Amazon vouchers per person
3rd - £10 Amazon vouchers per person

Lunch Provided: Pizza and soft drinks for all competitors.

Practicing: https://nottingham.kattis.com

Day Schedule:

10am - Arrival, Welcome & Rules

11am - Competition Begins

12:30pm - Lunch arrives (teams must strategically step out for food. the competition will not pause)

4pm - Competition finishes

4:15pm-ish - Prizes

Team Advice

Finding a good team is interesting. Of course - getting on well together is important. Another ideais to have: a) a fast and accurate programmer (who doesnt rely on java documentation as much for example), b) a good algorithmic thinker/designer, and c) someone who can think of reasons why the solution will break. A programmer, a designer, and a tester.

Programming Languages

C, C++, Java, Python, Haskell (hopefully)
- Problems are such that it is the efficiency of the algorithm, not the language chosen, that determines a pass in allocated execution time.

UoN Annual Week1 Programming Competition 2015