2000 U of S Programming Contest Rules/Procedures
Procedure
Due to the fact that it would be difficult to get all the interested
parties together at the same time, this contest is going to be run
as though it were a timed take-home test. Each contestant is to work
alone and spend no more than four hours doing so. Enforcement is
strictly by the "honor system". Timing starts when the contestant
begins reading one of the problem descriptions. Preferably, the
contestant will work on the problems during a single block of four
hours. However, as it may be difficult to find a single block of
time of that length, a contestant is allowed to split his work
among two blocks of time totaling no more than four hours.
One of the consequences of this arrangement is that, unlike the
ACM contest, no almost-immediate feedback from the judges will be
provided to a contestant in response to a program submission.
Programming Languages
The ACM contest allows the use of C, C++, or Java. For this contest,
you may use any of these, plus Ada.
Input/Output
For each problem there is a single input file and a single output file.
For these we will use standard input and standard output.
For testing purposes, if, for example, your executable is in the
file prob2.exe and you have placed input data in the file
named prob2_in.txt, and you want the output to be written
into prob2_out.txt, then you can use redirection
and issue (in an MS-DOS window) the command
prob2.exe < prob2_in.txt > prob2_out.txt
Submitting Solutions:
To submit a solution to the judge (McCloskey), email the source code
to mccloske@cs.uofs.edu.
The subject should indicate your name and the problem number.
The Problems:
There are seven problems. You should not expect to solve even close
to that many during a four-hour period. Indeed, to solve two
correctly would be good. Work on the two or three that seem easiest
to you, or on a difficult one that you are sure that you can solve
in four hours. (A solution to a difficult problem might impress the
judge!) Just for fun, work on others on your own time!
Problem 0: Stacks of Flapjacks
Problem 1:
Translating Rationals to Repeating Decimals
Problem 2: Binary Tree Traversals
Problem 3: Goldbach's Conjecture
Problem 4: All in the Family
Problem 5: Shortest Substring Containing
a Subsequence
Problem 6: Boolean Matrix
Error Correction