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2019

6th Virginia Tech High School Programming Contest​

announcement

The problems are now public on the contest site. You can still use your team account and upsolve.

102 teams from 31 high schools or organizations from 8 states (VA, CA, MD, NC, IL, TX, NJ, D.C.) participated in our 6th Virginia Tech High School programming contest on Dec 14, 2019. The top team, TJHSST - rip WCA feet, solved 11 problems, as did 3 other teams so that the ranking resulted from time penalties.

A total of 1,567 attempts were submitted, with 427 accepted runs. 89 out of 102 teams solved at least one problem, 66 solved 3 or more, and 35 solved 5 or more.

Congratulations to the following teams:​

  1. Place: TJHSST - rip WCA feet (Thomas Jefferson High School S&T): Danny Mittal, Ray Bai, Patrick Zhang
  2. Place: AlphaStar - Fire (AlphaStar Academy): Chris Zhang, Siyong Huang
  3. Place: AlphaStar - Air (AlphaStar Academy): Dougy Ouyang, Nathan Wang

The top 3 teams will receive cash prizes of $180, $120, and $60.

Final Scoreboard (static)

Problem Set (Solution Outlines)

I/O data and sample solutions (as .zip file)

Opening Slides pptx, pdf

Contest Report

During the contest, we encountered difficulties with 2 problems: E Musical Trees and K Random Digital Exponentiation. For E Musical Trees, the test data allowed wrong submissions (that made the same mistake as all judge solutions) to pass and correct submissions to be rejected. We corrected this by removing the test data for which that made a difference and judging the earliest submission that would pass under either data to be correct. Because we noticed this relatively soon into the contest, we were able to minimize the impact.

For K Random Digital Exponentiation, the judge data was generated under the wrong assumption that 0^0 = 1. We corrected that by removing the faulty data. Unfortunately, one of the teams that were in contention for a top spot was affected by this (AlphaStar Air) and lost some time because of this mistake. We would like to recognize them and apologize for this mistake.

Contest Description

Organization​

After our successful HS Programming Contests held in **2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, ** and 2018, we are excited to invite to this year's contest. As in past years, this contest will be held online. Anyone enrolled in a high school is eligible to participate; however, you will need a teacher (or parent volunteer) functioning as the official team coach or sponsor. Please see below for details of the rules.

Please share this event with your friends and colleagues at other schools! Capacity permitting, this event is open to all high schools in the United States and possibly beyond, although we hope to particularly attract teams from the MidAtlantic region.

The contest will be in the style of the ICPC contest, with teams of (up to) 3 students sharing a computer to solve as many problems as possible within 5 hours. A problem is judged by whether it produces the expected output for a given input within an allotted time limit.

We anticipate that there will be widely varying levels of skills and accordingly, the problems will require varying levels of skill. We will include problems that require only simple I/O, control structures such as if/else and/or loops, as well as problems that require basic algorithms. To skillfully participate in a contest such as this one, participants need to quickly triage problems and solve the easiest ones first.

All problems will involve reading input line by line from standard input, and outputting an answer to standard output. (No other file I/O is allowed.) Coaches should make sure that contestants are familiar with this style of I/O. This may require the use of java.util.Scanner or similar classes in Java or raw_input() or sys.stdin or similar in Python.

Practice

The problem sets from 2014-2018 are now available on Kattis! (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018). You can practice problems individually, but you can also create a contest with these problems (if you haven't done them already). You can also find links to additional practice sites here.

Details​

When​

Sat, Dec 14, 2019. 11:00am-5pm EST.

Where​

All Online

Contact/Registration​

Please register using this Google Form.

Schedule​

Regulation​

Rules​

  • Allowed languages are: Java, Python 2, Python 3, C, C++, Go, Scala, Racket, Ruby, and Haskell.
  • There will be an original problem set with 8-12 problems of varying difficulty.
  • Teams of 3 sharing one computer, as in an ICPC contest. You must have the ability to locally edit, compile, and test your code.
  • You will be using a web site to submit your solutions's source code. We will be using the PCS contest management system we have built here at Virginia Tech. Teams can try it out here.
  • Teams may not receive help from any human outside their team. The on-site coach is trusted with ensuring that.
  • The use of a printer, where available, is allowed and encouraged.
  • There is no sign-up fee.
  • There is no limit on the number of contestants a school can send.
  • Code that was written before the contest may be used. This is like at the ICPC regionals, where teams can bring prepared materials.

Requirements​

  • Internet Access

FAQ​