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.
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.
Your program cannot require any intervention by the user.
For example, if you pause the program and ask the user to press a key
to continue, you will be flagged with a
Submission Error. If you pause
the program without any prompting at all, you may be flagged with a
Time Limit Exceeded error.
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. Violating
this rule will result in a Submission Error.
All test cases used in judging will conform
to the input specifications. It is not necessary for you to detect invalid
input.
Input files and correct output files will obey the following rules.
Other than end-of-line characters, spaces are the only whitespace
that appear.
Two or more consecutive spaces do not appear, unless
specifically mentioned in the problem statement.
Spaces do not appear at the end of lines.
Spaces do not appear at the beginning of lines, unless specifically
mentioned in the problem statement.
Blank lines do not appear in the file.
All lines, including the last line in the file, end with the standard
end-of-line marker. (In MS-DOS and Windows 9x/NT this is the
standard carriage-return/linefeed sequence; in Unix it is a single linefeed.)
(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.
(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[]) {
...
}
....
}
Teams are ranked by the number of problems solved. Teams
solving the same number of problems are ranked by least total time
(see
Regional Rules). Teams solving the same number of problems with
the same total time are ranked by the geometric mean of the individual
times for each solved problem (smaller being better). Any remaining
ties are left unbroken unless they affect the winners of the regional
contest, in which case they are broken by a coin flip.
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:
accessing the Internet in any way,
disrupting power to computers,
corrupting judging materials or the judging process,
collaborating with anyone not on the team (this includes using a portable phone),
disobeying site officials' instructions regarding appropriate conduct.