East Central North America Region

The 2004 ACM East Central North America
Regional Programming Contest

Final Report

The 2004 ACM East Central North America Regional Programming Contest (ACM ECNA RPC) was held on Saturday November 6, 2004. We had 131 teams drawn from 72 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 (45 teams), Carnegie-Mellon Site in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (34 teams), Cincinnati Site in Cincinnati, Ohio (25 teams), and Sheridan Site in Oakville, Ontario, Canada (27 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 7.6 of the PC^2 Contest Control System was used to run the Contest. This decision was made to avoid the technical difficulties we had last year with the newer version of PC^2 and the reported problems with the newest version.

2. The contest started at 10:25:52 EST instead of 10:00:00 EST as scheduled. So, there was a 25 minute delay due to some problems with judges data files.

3. At 11:46 EST, the submissions arriving from the Carnegie-Mellon Site started to show a bogus time:
   • According to the logs of the Judges, the first submission that arrived from the Carnegie-Mellon Site showing a bogus time of 2 minutes was submission number 20. This submission was from team Vikings I of Cleveland State University.
   • The first scroeboard to show the bogus time/score was at 11:49:52 EST. Since it contains the "2 minutes" submission of CSU's Vikings I, it was determined that the clock malfunctioned at 01:21 Contest Time (after 81 minutes) which is equivalent to 11:46 EST.
   • Therefore, it was decided that all submissions that arrived from the Carnegie-Mellon Site after 01:21 Contest Time and were marked correct needed to be penalized 81 minutes per submission. Fortunately, this adjustment did not affect the ranking of the top ten teams, at least.

4. Around 13:05, the server at Ashland Site went down for about 30 minutes. It came back up and then crashed again twice. The servers at the Carnegie-Mellon Site and Sheridan Site crashed as well. As a result, the contest ended at 16:10:00 EST.

5. The contest consisted of 8 problems with 119 teams solving at least one problem.

6. The maximum number of problems solved was 8 problems.

7. Here are some photos from the competition at Sheridan Site
8. You may view or download the Problem Sets and Judges' Solutions.

9. You may view the Final Standings

Congratulations to the top 10 teams of The 2004 ECNA RPC:

Final Rank	Institute Name	Team Name	Number of Problems Solved	Total Time (in minutes)
1	University of Waterloo	Waterloo Black	8	799
2	University of Waterloo	Waterloo Gold	7	832
3	University of Michigan - Ann Arbor	Victors	6	1085
4	University of Michigan - Ann Arbor	Valiant	5	838
5	Carnegie Mellon University	Dragons	4	309
6	Carnegie Mellon University	Cardinals	4	346
7	University of Toronto	Toronto A	4	372
8	University of Toronto	Toronto 1	4	417
9	Ohio University	Bobcats	4	463
10	Miami University	Miami .EXE	4	477