Notes to Teams

  1. All output will be judged using a file comparison utility, so output must be exactly as shown in the examples. This applies to all problems, whether explicitly stated in the problem description or not. Spelling, punctuation, spacing, and case (uppercase/lowercase) are all significant.
  2. The judges will ignore all output to the screen. Only the contents of the specified output file will be judged. You can write as much debugging information to the screen as you want.
  3. Your program cannot require any intervention by the user. For example, you cannot pause the program and ask the user to press a key to continue. If you do, you will be flagged with a Submission Error.
  4. Do not use drive and/or path specifications when naming input and output files. If a problem indicates that the input file is named file.in, then you must open file.in and not a:file.in or c:\stuff\file.in or anything else. Failure to adhere to this rule will result in a Submission Error.
  5. All test cases used in judging will conform to the input specifications. It is not necessary for you to detect invalid input.
  6. Input files and correct output files will obey the following rules.
  7. (This applies only to C/C++ programmers.) If you are using an unfamiliar compiler, be sure that you know the sizes of all primitive data types. For example, in most MS-DOS and Windows 3.1x compilers an int is 16 bits, but in Windows 95/NT and Unix compilers an int is 32 bits.
  8. (This applies only to Java programmers.) If you are using the class ACMIO, be sure to have a copy of ACMIO.class in the current directory when compiling and running your program. The local site coordinator should tell you how to obtain a copy of ACMIO.class. The judges will provide their own copy when judging your program. Also note that, counter to Java conventions, the name of your source file and main class must be in lowercase for this competition. For example, if a problem states that your program must be called compute, then you would create a file called compute.java that begins like this:
    public class compute {
        public static void main(String args[]) {
            ...
        }
    
        ....
    }
    
  9. Any team that jeopardizes the integrity of the contest or violates the rules of the contest will be disqualified and the team members may be banned permanently from competing in the Mid-Central Region.
    Some examples of such actions are: