The Regional Chief Judges (Andy Harrington, Ron Pacheco, and Eric Shade) rank the problems as follows, with the author's name in parentheses:

Very Easy

Root of the Problem and Quicksum (Ron)

Easy/Moderate

Frugal Search, Linear Pachinko, and Surprising Strings (Eric)

Moderate/Hard

Go Go Gorelians (Ron)

Hard

Falling Ice (Andy)

Ron also had a couple of assists in writing alternative solutions for both Linear Pachinko and Falling Ice.

Andy has consistently written one or two hard problems to guard against the top teams flying through a set of easy problems and winning the contest with a lot of time left. However, over the last couple of years few if any teams even attempted, let alone solved, those hard problems. So this year we decided to go with seven problems. We expect the top teams to complete the first five problems fairly easily and be forced to tackle Go Go Gorelians and Falling Ice, with the team solving Falling Ice first likely to be the winner. We don't expect more than a few teams to solve all seven problems.

Please help us out and submit a problem!