Rules

1. Each team must bring at least one computer, a power strip, and an extension cord. One outlet will be available for each team. There is a limit of four students and two computers per team. We suggest that you bring laptops, which should be fully charged before arriving.
2. Teams will set up their machines from between 7:30 and 8:45. Each team may use the programming language of its choice, but proper installation of compilers and/or interpreters is the responsibility of the team. We urge everyone to fully test their hardware and software in advance of the contest.
3. The contest begins at 9:00 AM. There will be ten problems ranging in difficulty from elementary to difficult. The problems may be attempted in any order, although the order of the problems in the booklet is intended to correspond with the level of difficulty (easiest ones first, hard ones at the end).
4. Students may use textbooks or other written reference materials during the contest, but Internet access is not allowed. Members of one team may not discuss contest problems with members of any other team until the contest is over. Teachers may not help during the contest. Violations of these rules may result in disqualification.
5. There are no particular requirements concerning execution time, but every problem can be solved by a program that runs in at most 30 seconds (and usually in less than one second). A team may have written a solution that works in principle but seems to freeze on large inputs, and in that case the team may need to rethink its approach to the problem.
6. Each team is assigned a judge who will be stationed nearby. When a team believes it has correctly solved a problem, the judge will record the time and then read test inputs to one of the team members. If the program produces incorrect output, the time will be erased and the team may continue to work on that problem or move on to another. If the program produces correct output for each case, the recorded time will stand as the official time of completion for that problem.
7. When the contest is over, all teams will be ranked based on the number of problems completed, with ties broken by time of completion for the last correct solution.

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