Rules

Summary of Rules

Each team consists of up to three contestants. Each contestant must be a student enrolled in a university. At most one contestant of each team may hold a B.S. degree.
Only one team from a given institution may advance to the World Finals.
Contestants may bring resource materials such as books, manuals, and program listings. Contestants may not bring any machine-readable versions of software or data.
Eight problems will be posed in English to be solved in 5 hours. So far as possible, problems will avoid dependence on detailed knowledge of a particular application area or particular programming language.

Each team will use a single Pentium workstation.
The programming languages of the regional contest are Pascal and C++. The programming languages of the World Finals are Pascal, C, C++, and Java.
Solutions to problems submitted for judging are called runs. Each run is judged as accepted or rejected by a judge, and the team is notified of the results online.
Teams are ranked according to the most problems solved. Teams with the same number of problems solved are ranked by least total time. The total time is the sum of the time consumed for each problem solved. The time consumed for a solved problem is the time elapsed from the beginning of the contest to the submittal of the accepted run plus 20 penalty minutes for every rejected run for that problem regardless of submittal time. There is no time consumed for a problem that is not solved.