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Icpc_logo.png
ACM ICPC logo
ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (abbreviated as ACM/ICPC or just ICPC) is an annual activity of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) that provides college students with an opportunity to demonstrate and sharpen their problem-solving and computing skills. The event is sponsored by IBM.
History
The contest traces its roots to a competition held at Texas A&M in 1970 hosted by the Alpha Chapter of the UPE Computer Science Honor Society. The contest evolved into its present form as a multi-tier competition in 1977, with the first finals held at the ACM Computer Science Conference. It has been held annually since then. Originally, the contest included mainly teams from US and Canada. It has grown into a worldwide competition with teams from 75 countries in 2004.
Since the beginning of IBM's sponsorship in 1997, contest participation has grown enormously. In 1997, 560 teams from 840 universities participated. In 2004, 1582 teams from 4109 universities participated. The number of teams keeps increasing by 10-20% every year and future competitions may be even larger.
Contest rules
ACM/ICPC is a team competition. Each team consists of three students. Participiants 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++, Pascal 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, ACM/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 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.
Winners
The world finals champions since 1977 are:
- 2004 - St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics, Russia
- 2003 - Warsaw University, Poland
- 2002 - Shanghai Jiaotong University, China
- 2001 - St. Petersburg State University, Russia
- 2000 - St. Petersburg State University, Russia
- 1999 - University of Waterloo, Canada
- 1998 - Charles University, Czech Republic
- 1997 - Harvey Mudd College, United States
- 1996 - University of California, Berkeley, United States
- 1995 - Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany
- 1994 - University of Waterloo, Canada
- 1993 - Harvard University, United States
- 1992 - University of Melbourne, Australia
- 1991 - Stanford University, United States
- 1989 - University of Otago, New Zealand
- 1988 - University of California at Los Angeles, United States
- 1987 - Stanford University, United States
- 1986 - California Institute of Technology, United States
- 1985 - Stanford University, United States
- 1984 - Johns Hopkins University, United States
- 1983 - University of Nebraska, United States
- 1982 - Baylor University, United States
- 1981 - University of Missouri-Rolla, United States
- 1980 - Washington University in St. Louis, United States
- 1979 - Washington University in St. Louis, United States
- 1978 - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
- 1977 - Michigan State University, United States
Upcoming contests
- The 2005 world finals will be held at Pudong Shangri-La Hotel in Shanghai, hosted by Shanghai Jiaotong University, April 3-7 2005. 4,109 teams representing 1,582 universities from 71 countries competed in elimination rounds, with 78 of those teams proceding to the world finals.
See also
- TopCoder, a similar set of competitions conducted online.
External link
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