Note: you are encouraged to bring hardcopies of this page or any other pages from our web site to the Regional Contest.

Each team will be assigned a work area that includes a computer workstation, a small table desktop, and three chairs.

The contest will be held on networked Pentium-III and Pentium-IV computers running a patched Red Hat Linux Fedora 7 with the Gnome X-Windows environment.

Each team will have a machine of its own to use during the contest. During the contest, contestants are to use the network only to submit contest problems or questions and get responses from the contest officials. Connecting to any other computer on the LAN or Internet, either before or during the contest, with telnet, FTP, Web browser, email, or any other network application is grounds for expulsion from the contest.

Programming Languages

What tools and documentation will be available online?

• Eclipse
• gdb and jdb debuggers
• UNIX manual pages
• Java html-based API docs (Javadoc)
• C++ STL documentation from SGI

C++ Notes

Programs will be compiled using libstdc++ (-l stdc++).

Editors

For additional information on the editors, please see the Guide to UNIX and Editors.

Note: jed and pico are not supported.

Contest-Specific Commands

Unless otherwise stated in the problem description, each of your programs is to read all its input from standard input and write all its output to standard output. For each problem, your submission will consist of a single source file.

The software environment provides the following commands to the contestants:

• To compile source code into an executable with the same options as used by the judges:

    compile source_file

• To send source code to be judged:   (source_file must end in .c, .C, or .java)

    submit problem_number source_file

  submit will prompt you to enter a password. This password is the first four characters of your login password.

  Source file sizes are limited to 300000 bytes. If the size of your source file exceeds the limit, submit will return the messages

      Your submission is N bytes, which exceeds the 300000 byte limit.
      Submission denied.
      

• To obtain supplementary and sample data files:

    getdata

• To ask the judges a question (with the question in file file_name):

    question file_name

• To obtain the response to your submission from the judges:
  

    status

  This command replaces the use of e-mail to read the judges' response.

• To display judges' answers to questions from all contestants:

    answers

• To display the most recent scoreboard:

    score

• To print the time remaining in the contest:
  

    timeleft

Judging

After you have submitted a source file for judging, your submission will be run with one or several sets of input data and the results reviewed. It is the judges' intent never to reveal directly or indirectly the specific input data the judges use to test contestant programs. The judges will respond to your submission with one of the following messages. If a submission contains more than one type of error, the response will still contain only one message. The judges will report only the first error seen, which may not necessarily be the error that occurs first or most frequently in the output.

• Correct. Congratulations!

  You have solved the problem.

• Syntax Error

  The judges were unable to compile your program. Check whether

  • you submitted the correct source file;
  • the source file has the proper extension for its language;
  • you tested the compilation before submitting the file.

  No expression or line number information will be returned to contestants.

• Run Time Error

  Your program crashed during execution or an assertion failed. In the former case, the judges' response will also include a description of the signal received by the program, e.g., "Segmentation Fault." If an assertion failed, the message will state, "Assertion Failed." In neither case will expression, file, or line number information be returned to contestants.

• Time Limit Exceeded

  Your program ran for more than 60 CPU seconds.

• Wrong Answer

  Your program did not produce the expected results.

• Presentation Error

  The output of your program is incorrectly formatted. Check that the significant digits, delimiters, whitespace, spelling, etc., in your program's output conform to that given in the problem description.

The judges will attempt to return responses within a few minutes of submission. If it takes longer, we either are having to deal with a large number of submissions or are having other problems. (Typically, the very first submission for a problem will take slightly longer than usual to judge; also, the last half hour of the contest is usually extremely busy. Programs that require more CPU time or that have infinite loops will also take longer to judge for obvious reasons.)

Dvorak Keyboard Users

The PCs can accommodate users who prefer the Dvorak keyboard layout. Contestants may bring keyboard overlays (skins) and/or paper reference materials but may not bring keyboards. Dvorak key mappings are available in both the pseudo-console and X environments.

The following command switches the pseudo-console to Dvorak mode.

  loadkeys ANSI-dvorak

The following command switches the pseudo-console back to the default ("qwerty") keyboard.

  loadkeys us

To switch the layout in the X environment, issue the following sequence of commands. The first command saves the current (default) layout in a file that can later be read by xmodmap. The second command switches the layout to Dvorak mode (but with Num Lock disabled). The third command restores the default layout (with Num Lock still disabled). All windows will be affected.

  xmodmap -pke > ~/xmodmap.default

  xmodmap /usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.dvorak

  xmodmap ~/xmodmap.default

The xmodmap commands affect only the current X session and will not persist after logging out of the X session. The loadkeys commands, however, will take effect for future logins until the system is rebooted. Since we reboot all the contest workstations (and wipe the user home directories) between the warmup session and the start of the contest as part of our standard initialization procedure, any workstations that were used in Dvorak mode for the warmup session will have been reset to the default keyboard for the contest.

If you have any questions about the Contest Environment, send them to <systems@socalcontest.acm.org> .

For more information regarding UNIX or the editors that will be available, see our Guide to UNIX and Editors.