East Central North America Region

The 2003 ACM East Central North America
Regional Programming Contest

Final Report

The 2003 ACM East Central North America Regional Programming Contest (ACM ECNA RPC) was held on Saturday November 8, 2003. We had 128 teams drawn from 71 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: Ashland Site in Ashland, Ohio (46 teams), Carnegie Mellon Site in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (30 teams), Cincinnati Site in Cincinnati, Ohio (26 teams), and Sheridan Site in Oakville, Ontario, Canada (26 teams).

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

1. Version 8.5 of the PC^2 Contest Control System was installed to be used to run the Contest. About 30-40 minutes into the Practice Contest on Friday November 7, the PC^2 problems sarted to happen. Within 10 minutes from that point, the system started freezing and all servers started throwing RMI Exceptions. In the end, the PC^2 environment stopped working at the four sites and because unusable. The only conclusion was that PC^2 Version 8.5 is not ready yet to be used in our environment. Since we learned earlier from the PC^2 Team that there is potentially a significant issue with Version 8.5 of PC^2, the Contest System Administration decided at that point to revert to Version 7.6 of the PC^2 Contest Control System. Overnight, all four sites were switched back to PC^2 Version 7.6 that we used last year.

2. The contest started at 10:39:10 instead of 10:00:00 as scheduled. So, there was a 40 minute delay due to some technical problems at different sites. The contest ended at 15:39:10.

3. The contest consisted of 8 problems with 96 teams solving at least one problem.

4. The maximum number of problems solved was 7 problems.

5. You may view or download the problem sets

6. You may view the final standings

Congratulations to the top 10 teams of The 2003 ECNA RPC:

Final Rank	Institute Name	Team Name	Number of Problems Solved	Total Time (in minutes)
1	University of Waterloo	Waterloo Black	7	687
2	University of Toronto	Toronto A	6	774
3	University of Waterloo	Waterloo Gold	6	848
4	University of Michigan - Ann Arbor	UM Mighty Hackers	6	1079
5	University of Michigan - Ann Arbor	UM Code Warriors	5	820
6	York University	York Gold	5	990
7	University of Toronto	Toronto 1	5	1002
8	Miami University	Miami White	4	593
9	Brock University	Brock Output	4	641
10	Carnegie Mellon University	Dragons	4	672