Contest Environment
Contest Rules
Students compete in teams of four. Programs are written in C++,
and submitted electronically to the judges who test the programs
and decide if a submission satisfies the correctness criteria.
Contestants are allowed to bring textbooks and notes, but no disks
or other computer media. If you are interested in additional details
about the format of the competition, you can view the
complete rules.
Programming in C++
This was the first year contestants for the programming contest
were required to submit their solutions in C++. There are
several good books on learning C++. We provide links to a few
books below.
The programming contest was not designed
to test your knowledge of features of C++, so students only
need to learn C++ sufficiently well to implement their
programs efficiently and correctly.
We used Microsoft Visual C++
Developer Studio (version 6.0),
but students were not allowed to use any Microsoft specific
language extensions or template classes.
Another good resource on C++ is from the Advanced Placement
Computer Science exam. As an aid to contestants, the APCS
C++ Classes will be provided. These classes allow contestants
to use existing code for queues, stacks, strings, vectors,
and matrices, if they desire.