ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest

ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (abbreviated as ACM-ICPC or just ICPC) is an annual multi-tiered competition among the universities of the world. The ICPC challenges students to set ever higher standards of excellence for themselves through competition that rewards team work, problem analysis, and rapid software development. The contest is sponsored by IBM. Headquarted at Baylor University, with autonomous regions on six continents, the ICPC operates under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

History

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, ICPC, traces its roots to a competition held at Texas A&M University in 1970 hosted by the Alpha Chapter of the Upsilon Pi Epsilon Computer Science Honor Society (UPE). The contest evolved into its present form as a multi-tier competition in 1977, with the first finals held in conjunction with the ACM Computer Science Conference.

From 1977 to 1989, the contest included mainly teams from U.S. and Canada. Headquartered at Baylor University since 1989, with regionals established within the world's university community, operating under the auspices of ACM, and with substantial industry support, the ICPC has grown into a worldwide competition with teams from 84 countries in 2005.

Since the beginning of IBM's sponsorship in 1997, contest participation has grown enormously. In 1997, 840 teams from 560 universities participated. In 2005, 5,606 teams from 1,737 universities participated. The number of teams keeps increasing by 10-20% every year and future competitions may be even larger.

The World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, ACM-ICPC World Finals, is the final round of competition. Over its history it has become a 4-day event held in the finest venues world-wide. ^* recognizes all of the regional champions at the event. Recent World Champion teams have been recognized by their country's head of state and at the annual ACM Awards Ceremony.

Contest rules

The ICPC is a team competition. Current rules stipulate that each team consist of three students. Participants must be university students, who have had less than five years of university education before the contest. Students who have previously competed in two World Finals or four regional competitions are ineligible to compete again.

During contest, the teams are given 5 hours to solve between 8 and 10 programming problems (with 8 typical for regionals and 10 for finals). They must submit solutions as programs in C, C++, or Java. Programs are then run on test data. If a program fails to give a correct answer, the team is notified about that and they can submit another program.

The winner is the team which correctly solves most problems. If several teams solve an equal number of problems, the placement of teams is determined by the time when they submitted the correct solutions.

For example, consider a situation when two teams, A and B, solve two problems each. The team A submitted their solutions 1:00 and 2:45 after the beginning of the contest. The team B submitted solutions 1:20 and 2:00 after the beginning. Then, the total time is 1:00+2:45=3:45 for team A and 1:20+2:00=3:20 for team B and team B wins.

If, before submitting the correct solution, the team has submitted incorrect solution to the same problem, it receives a 20 minute penalty for each incorrect solution attempt.

Compared to other programming contests (for example, International Olympiad in Informatics), the ICPC is characterized by a large number of problems (8 or more problems in just 5 hours). Another feature is that each team can use only one computer, although teams have three students. This makes the time pressure even greater. Good teamwork and ability to withstand pressure is needed to win.

Regionals and World Finals

The contest consists of several stages. Many universities hold local contests to determine participants at the regional level. Then, universities compete in Regional contests. Winners of Regional contests advance to the ACM-ICPC World Finals. More than one team from a university can compete in regionals, but only one may compete at the world finals. From each region, at least one team goes to World Finals. Regions with large number of teams send multiple teams to finals (sometimes as many as 6 teams from one very large region).

No participant can take part in more than two World Finals.

Some large regions also hold Subregional competitions which are intermediate between local and regional contests.

2005 World Finals

The 2005 world finals were held at Pudong Shangri-La Hotel in Shanghai on April 6, 2005, hosted by Shanghai Jiaotong University. 4,109 teams representing 1,582 universities from 71 countries competed in elimination rounds, with 78 of those teams proceeding to the world finals. Shanghai Jiaotong University won its second world title, with 8 of 10 problems solved.

2006 World Finals

The 2006 ACM-ICPC World Finals were held in San Antonio, Texas, sponsored by IBM and hosted by Baylor University. 5,606 teams representing 1,733 universities from 84 countries competed in elimination rounds, with 83 of those teams proceeding to the world finals. Saratov State University from Russia won, solving 6 of 10 problems.