Notes to Teams Last modified Sep 24 2003
  1. Programs must be in a single source file with the name specified in the problem description; failure to meet this requirement is a Submission Error. Java programmers, note that you can include additional top-level classes in a single source file as long they are unqualified (just "class", without "public").
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. All test cases used in judging will conform to the input specifications. It is not necessary for you to detect invalid input.
  7. Input files and correct output files will obey the following rules.
  8. This applies only to Java programmers. (A) 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. (B) 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. Teams are ranked by the number of problems solved, with teams solving the same number of problems ranked by least total time (see Regional Scoring). 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 regional winners, in which case they are broken by a coin flip.
  10. 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: