Final Report
November 4, 2017
The 2017 ACM ICPC East Central North America Regional Programming Contest (ACM ICPC ECNA RPC) was held on Saturday, October 28, 2017. We had 139 teams from 49 colleges and universities throughout western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, eastern Ontario, and Indiana (excluding the Greater Chicago Metropolitan Area).
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:
- University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, Ohio (36 teams from 12 schools)
- Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan (30 teams from 9 schools)
- University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario (24 teams from 10 schools)
- Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio (49 teams from 18 schools)
The ECNA RPC was successful, with only three issues of note. Some observations:
- The software environment was modeled after the specifications given for the 2017 ICPC World Finals. Only minor modifications were made to account for hardware differences and matching the C++ standard to what Kattis uses.
- We used Kattis again this year for the contest control system.
- Our judges shared two of our contest problems with the North Central NA contest. This led to several minor changes in the conduct of our contest:
- Kattis typically hosts a parallel contest on their open server; this year, the start of the open contest was delayed 2:15:00 to allow the North Central contest to begin.
- Each contestant received a printed copy of the problem set at the start of the contest. Coaches and reserves were given printed copies once the North Central contest began.
- To preserve secrecy, Kattis did not provide an online copy of the problem statement or sample data until the North Central contest began. Contest staff provided the sample data online via a separate URL.
- The contest started promptly at 10am and ended at 3pm.
- The contest consisted of 10 problems with 133 teams solving at least one problem. The maximum number of problems solved by any team was 9.
Issues
There were three issues of note during the contest.
It was noted that the IDEs were sluggish to load and would sometimes freeze during loading. It was also found that the IDEs could often be coaxed into loading by successively starting and stopping them. This issue will be examined in more detail as soon as is practical in order to avoid this problem in the future.
One site had an issue with contestants’ machines locking up, necessitating a reboot. While this delayed many of the teams at the site by anywhere between 2 and 9 minutes, a review of the final standings indicates that the standings would not have been different had there been no delay.
During the contest, Kattis had two periods when it was either sluggish or unable to communicate. During these periods, teams could continue their work but not submit any solutions. The first occurrence happened at about 2:40:00 and lasted about ten minutes; the second occurrence was at about 3:30:00 and lasted about 20 minutes.
You can view the final standings here.
You can view the problem sets, test data and judges' solutions here.
Special Awards
Congratulations to the following teams on their awards:
- Jolly Jumpers (highest jump in rank from the previous year)
Ohio Wesleyan Bishops B, jumping from 84th place in 2016 to 32nd place - Extreme Programmers (earliest correct solution)
York Red, solving problem C in 0:06 - Steadfast Gurus (last correct solution)
Oberlin ');DROP TABLE Teams;--, solving problem H with 6 minutes remaining - Solid Programmers, solving the most problems with fewest
penalties
Red, solving four problems with no incorrect submissions. - Relentless Programmers (most attempts before correct solution)
GC Wolverines and Columbus Josephus, both solving problem D on their 10th attempt
Note: Teams are only eligible to win one prize; only two teams per school are eligible to win a prize.