Programming Contest Resources

Mid-Central Regional site
Online Practice Systems

ACM-ICPC Live Archive
Open Kattis
UVa Online Judge
North American Online Practice Competitions
Online submission system at SLU

Documentation
Bookshelf
Our Notes
Our Practices

Mid-Central Regional site

Please see the main website for our Mid-Central Region for rules of the contest and other valuable information. The "Acrhives" link on this page contains many years worth of past problems, including access to the input and output used by the judges that year, and even sample solutions written by the judges.

Onlien Practice Systems

There are a seemingly endless supply of past programming contest challenges on which to practice. In this section, we highlight some of those resources.

ACM-ICPC Live Archive
The ACM-ICPC Live Archive contains many years worth of past problems for regionals and world finals, and it has an online submissions system allowing you to upload source code to attempt to solve problems using a feedback system similar to the contest.
Open Kattis
Our regional competition uses an online juding system named Kattis. It is possible to experiment with that submission system through the website open.kattis.com. Much like the ICPC Live Archive, there are many old problems loaded into that system for which you can submit attempted solutions. They also run occassional timed contests that are even more like the atmosphere of our reginal competition.
UVa Online Judge
The UVa Online Judge is another site allowing you to submit attempted solutions for a variety of programming problems. Much of its content has been taken over by the new ACM-ICPC Live Archive, but there are some additional problems on this site that were not from the ICPC competitions. I'd recommend sticking with the Live Archive, but if you run out of problems and need more...
North American Online Practice Contests
There will be a series of online practice contests on Saturday/Sundays in the fall, run on the same Kattis system that is used during our regional contests. For more information, see naipc.uchicago.edu/practices/
Online submissions system at SLU
While the online systems are probably most convenient, for many of the problems that we discuss in our practices here at SLU, I have placed the associated judges input/output on our system so that you can have your submitted solutions judged against that data in an automated fashion. This system also tracks your submissions so that I can see your attempts and examine your source code.

To submit a solution, you must be logged into hopper or one of the Linux Lab machines, and execute a command such as
```
      /public/goldwasser/icpc/submit sample.cpp
```
where sample.cpp is the appropriate source code for the problem. Our system is willing to accept code in C++, Java, or Python (although it is not yet clear if Python will be allowed at this year's regionals). Also, the filename (e.g., sample) must precisely match the expectiations outlined in a problem statement, as we use that choice of name to determine which problem you are attempting.
Note: Input/Output conventions on our system are the following. Input will always be read from a file having a name such as sample.in, where sample was the identifier for the problem. Output should always be directed to standard out. These are the conventions currently used for our Region, so we use them for all practice problems (even if the problem statement says otherwise).
Please see the complete list of available problems for our online system.

Documentation

The standard libraries for algorithms and data structures are great assets for these contests, as many commonly needed concepts are already coded and ready for you to use. Please make sure that you familiarize yourself with them. Most notably:

C++
For the Standard Template Library (STL), I prefer the documentation from cplusplus.com, in particular
- containers libraries
- algorithms library
or else the corresponding documentation from SGI's website.

Java
For Java, the standard documentation is now located on Oracle's site. Of particular interest to this contest should be the Collections Library, which includes not only data structres for common container types, but also general algorithms for sorting, searching, min, max, etc.

Bookshelf

Since we are allowed to bring books into the contest, its good to consider what to bring. Here are some top choices of mine:

Your Favorite Language Reference
Although some general documentation for the standard libraries should be provided online during the contest, better to not count on that. Bring your favorite quick reference to the standard libraries (e.g., Nutshell series). You want something that will help you quickly find that library that you need, or to remind you of the interface for the functions.

Competitive Programming, 3rd Edition, by Steven Halim and Felix Halim
This 2013 edition is probably the best resource for top teams, providing enormous amounts of algorithmic code, written in a way that is meant to minimize efforts during a contest.
Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein
This is the premier undergraduate and graduate textbook and can be used quite well as a reference. It does not go so far as to give you working code, but it describes high level approaches for algorithms you might need (e.g., dynamic programming, common graph algorithms).

Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual, by Skiena and Revilla
This is a book that is clearly marketed to programming contestants. It is designed a bit better for advanced preparation rather than as a desk reference for use during the contest, but there are some useful pieces of code there for some common tasks.

Computational Geometry in C, by Joseph O'Rourke
This is a specialized book for problems that involve geometric data. We usually see at least one of these types of problems each year in our region, and this book gives you code for many common geometric primitives that you might not want to re-derive under time pressure: do two line segments intersect, and if so, where; what is the area of a triangle that is specified by its three vertices, is a point within a circle, what is the tangent line between a point and a circle. This book also has thorough discussion of more advanced computational geometry algorithms (e.g., computing a convex hull, triangulating a polygon) that may be helpful in some cases.

Our Notes

In addition to books, we can bring in paper copies of any other information that we wish to prepare, including complete source code for many common tasks. In the long run, I envision a comprehensive document covering everything you'd ever want to know during a programming contest, with a thorough table of contents for using this document. But for now, we'll have to start writing some materials as we prepare. I'll manage keeping all of this in a single document for the contest, but I ask you to think about what sort of code you may have written for one problem that seems reusable for other related problems.

Please see our current draft of such a sheet (password required).

Our Practices

Michael Goldwasser

Last modified: Tuesday, 19 September 2017