East Central North America Region

The 2012 ACM-ICPC East Central North America
Regional Programming Contest

Final Report

The 2012 ACM-ICPC East Central North America Regional Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC ECNA RPC) was held on Saturday November 3, 2012. We had 131 teams drawn from 63 colleges and universities throughout western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, eastern Ontario, and Indiana (excluding the Greater Chicago Metropolitan Area). These are new record numbers for our regional contest. There was an additional 11 teams from 7 colleges and universities who were registered but did not participate and were canceled.

As it was difficult for some teams in the ECNA region to travel to a single site for the contest, the ECNA RPC was held as a distributed contest. There were four contest sites: Cincinnati Site in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA (31 teams from 16 schools); Grand Valley Site in Allendale, Michigan, USA (24 teams from 11 schools); Windsor Site in Windsor, Ontario, Canada (24 teams from 12 schools); and Youngstown Site in Youngstown, Ohio, USA (52 teams from 24 schools).

We are pleased to report that the ECNA RPC was successful this year. Here are a few comments and observations:

1. Version 9.2.3 of the PC^2 Contest Control System was used to run the Contest.

2. The contest started at 10:00:02 EST and ended at 15:00:02 EST. A time synchronization problem was reported this year. Two sites (Cincinnati and Grand Valley) were not completely ready to start the contest. Cincinnati Site had teams outside the labs since they were initially told that their site was on hold. The 3 minute warning to start the contest was not sufficient for all the teams to get to their stations comfortably to start the contest. At Grand Valley Site, they had to rush the distribution of the problem set as the contest had just started. As a result, approximately two minutes had passed from actual contest start. We must do a better job next year synchronizing the contest start time through a grand countdown announcement.

3. The contest consisted of 9 problems with 77 teams solving at least one problem.

4. The maximum number of problems solved was 9 problems.

5. About 43 minutes into the contest, the judges discovered an error in the sample input data distributed to contestants for Problem G. The error was fixed and the contestants were notified before any submissions for the problem were made.

6. After publishing the Judges' Solutions and Data, it was reported to me that an input case for Problem I did not meet the specifications of the problem. The input case was removed from the input file for Problem I and all submissions for the problem were rejudged. Nothing changed. All the wrong submissions were wrong and the correct submission was still correct.

7. You may view or download the Problem Sets and Judges' Solutions.

8. You may view the Final Standings.

9. Congratulations to the top 15 teams of The 2012 ECNA RPC

10. Congratulations to the top 10 teams at each site

11. Congratulations to the winners of special awards