NCPC 2022

Saturday October 8th 11:00-16:00 CEST (UTC+2)

Information

The Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest 2022 took place Saturday October 8th 11:00-16:00 CEST (UTC+2). In total 201 teams participated from 7 countries, trying to solve as many as possible of the 11 problems.

The winning team was The Balloon Animals from University of Copenhagen, Denmark, who solved all 11 problems before the scoreboard freeze! #define true rand from Vilnius University, Lithuania got second place, also solving all 11 problems. Keksi Fan Club from University of Helsinki, Finland placed third, solving 10 problems! Congratualtions to the top teams!

For the all results, have a look at the final results.

Contest links:

Final results
Post-contest solutions and results live stream: youtube
Problem set: ncpc2022problems.pdf
Slides describing solutions: ncpc22slides.pdf
Packaged problems including testdata, solutions, wrong solutions, output validators, input generators, problem statement sources, etc: ncpc2022-problems.zip (141 MB)
Judges’ solutions: ncpc2022-solutions.zip (43 KB)

The rules have changed since previous years, please read through them. Notably:

NCPC 2022 will take place on site throughout the Nordic countries for the first time since 2019.
Your team is allowed to compete from a single personal computer.

The winners will be Nordic Champions in programming. Universities may select student teams that advance to NWERC, the regional finals in the ICPC contest. NCPC also encompasses national and local championships.

NCPC will use the Kattis automatic judging system provided by Kattis. If you have never used it, we encourage you to try it out before the contest to make sure you know how it works.

Instructions for the Kattis contest system
For a short tutorial on how to use it, go to one of the language-specific help pages available from the previous link.
If you have not participated before, it is a good idea to look at the problems from last year’s NCPC.

Practice contests

Some practice contests were hosted to practice on before NCPC.

Date	Link
2022-09-11 11-16	https://open.kattis.com/contests/ncpc22practice1
2022-09-17 11-16	https://open.kattis.com/contests/ncpc22practice2
2022-09-25 11-16	https://open.kattis.com/contests/ncpc22practice3
2022-10-01 11-16	https://open.kattis.com/contests/ncpc22practice4
2022-10-01 18-23	https://maps22.kattis.com/contests/maps22

Registration

The registration closed the 5th of October.

ICPC website for the contest: https://icpc.global/regionals/finder/Nordic-2022.

Student teams should verify that the ICPC eligibility status is marked green “Eligibility: Predicted eligible”. This is important to be able to advance to the regional contest NWERC. If it the status is red “Eligibility: Predicted ineligible” you can click the eligibility button and scroll down to view the log of reasons of why your team is predicted ineligible. The most common reason is that some team member has an incomplete ICPC profile.

Sites

Below is a list of sites that will hopefully join NCPC in 2022.

Pending Confirmation means that the site was organized last year, but it has not been confirmed that it will be organized this year.

	University	Contact information	Status
🇩🇰	University of Copenhagen Danish Technical University ITU Copenhagen	Monica Borup Duch `<mbd netcompany.com>` Anne Honum `<ahhj netcompany.com>` Klaus Skelbæk Madsen `<ksm jobindex.dk>`	✅ Confirmed
🇩🇰	Aarhus University	Gerth Stølting Brodal `<gerth cs.au.dk>` Sheila Lærkegaard Johannesen `<sljo netcompany.com>`	✅ Confirmed
🇪🇪	Tallinn University of Technology	Ago Luberg `<ago.luberg taltech.ee>`	✅ Confirmed
🇪🇪	University of Tartu	Meelis Kull `<meelis.kull ut.ee>`	✅ Confirmed
🇫🇮	Aalto University	Jukka Suomela `<jukka.suomela aalto.fi>`	✅ Confirmed
🇫🇮	University of Helsinki	Antti Laaksonen `<ahslaaks cs.helsinki.fi>`	✅ Confirmed
🇮🇸	Reykjavik University	Arnar Bjarni Arnarson `<keppnisforritun gmail.com>`	✅ Confirmed
🇱🇹	Vilnius University	Vladas Tumasonis `<vladas.tumasonis mif.vu.lt>`	✅ Confirmed
🇱🇹	Vilnius Gediminas Technical University	Artūras Mackūnas `<arturas.mackunas vilniustech.lt>`	✅ Confirmed
🇱🇹	Kaunas University of Technology	Mindaugas Vasiljevas `<mindaugas.vasiljevas ktu.lt>`	✅ Confirmed
🇳🇴	NTNU Trondheim	Kristoffer Nyvoll `<kristnyv stud.ntnu.no>`	✅ Confirmed
🇳🇴	University of Bergen	Brigt Håvardstun `<Brigt.Havardstun student.uib.no>` Torstein Strømme `<Torstein.Stromme uib.no>`	✅ Confirmed
🇳🇴	University of Oslo	Sergey Jakobsen `<sergeyj uio.no>`	✅ Confirmed
🇳🇴	UiT - Narvik	Ronny Stirling `<rst112 post.uit.no>`	✅ Confirmed
🇸🇪	Chalmers	Victor Song `<songv chalmers.se>`	✅ Confirmed
🇸🇪	Karlstad University	Jonathan Vestin `<jonathan.vestin kau.se>`	✅ Confirmed
🇸🇪	Linköpings universitet	Lowe Kozak Åslöv `<ordf lithekod.se>`	✅ Confirmed
🇸🇪	Luleå Institute of Technology	Anton Johansson `<anton.johansson ludd.ltu.se>`	Pending Confirmation
🇸🇪	Lund University	Måns Magnusson `<exoji2e gmail.com>` Per Andersson `<per.andersson cs.lth.se>`	✅ Confirmed
🇸🇪	KTH Royal Institute of Technology	Björn Martinsson `<bmart kth.se>`	✅ Confirmed
🇸🇪	Umeå University	Tomas Forsman `<stric cs.umu.se>`	✅ Confirmed

If you are a site director please email Måns Magnusson at exoji2e@gmail.com to confirm that your site will be hosted. You can also email me if you wish to organize a site at a non-listed university.

Rules

In short: Teams of up to three persons try to solve as many problems as possible from a set, without external help.

The rules for this contest is given by the ICPC regional contest rules, with the following clarifications and additions:

Who may compete

The teams competing consist of up to three persons. The competition is open to everybody, as long as they are either a citizen of the NCPC countries or related to an entity (company or university) in the NCPC countries. Every team must compete for some NCPC country.

ICPC eligibility

Teams consisting of university students, who are ICPC eligible, are encouraged to participate in the ICPC division. These may qualify for the regional finals (NWERC), and further to the ICPC World Finals. Basically, any student born in 1999 or later, and who started their university/college studies in 2018 or later is eligible to compete. For exceptions such as retaken years, military service and so on, please refer to the ICPC rules. Persons who have competed in five regional finals already, or two world finals, may not compete in the ICPC division.

How and where you may compete (temporary rules for 2022)

In 2022, the contest is held at the participating sites.
All members of a team have to be present at the same site.
Your team may bring a single personal computer (with one keyboard, one mouse and one screen) to use during the competition.
You may not use any additional electronic devices (such as mobile phones) to compete.

What you may do during the contest (temporary rules for 2022)

You may use prewritten code and whatever software is available on your computer.
You may use any reference materials you have access to in books or on the Internet (e.g. wikipedia and other information your favorite search engine can turn up).
You may NOT communicate with anyone other than the contest organisers and your own team members (in particular you may not communicate with other teams or ask for help on discussion forums).

The contest

The problem set consists of a number of problems (usually 8-12). The problem set will be in English, and given to the participating teams when the contest begins. For each of these problems, you are to write a program in any of the programming languages supported by the Kattis system (see here for a list). The jury guarantees that each problem is solvable in C++ and Java. No guarantees for other languages are given due to the large number of allowed languages, however the jury guarantees that for every language there is at least one problem solvable in that language (it has always been the case that several of the problems were solvable in all available languages, but there is no guarantee of this).

The submitted programs must read from standard input (stdin) and write to standard output (stdout), unless otherwise stated. After you have written a solution, you may submit it using the specified submission system.

The team that solves the most problems correctly wins. If two teams solve the same number of problems, the one with the lowest total time wins. If two top teams end up with the same number of problems solved and the same total time, then the team with the lowest time on a single problem is ranked higher. If two teams solve the same number of problems, with the same total time, and the same time on all problems, it is a draw. The time for a given problem is the time from the beginning of the contest to the time when the first correct solution was submitted, plus 20 minutes for each incorrect submission of that problem. The total time is the sum of the times for all solved problems, meaning you will not get extra time for a problem you never submit a correct solution to.

If you feel that a problem definition is ambiguous, you may submit a clarification request via the submission system. If the judges think there is no ambiguity, you will get a short answer stating this. Otherwise, the judges will write a clarification, that will be sent to all teams at all sites in the contest.

Change-log

2022-09-22 added info about age requirement for ICPC eligibility.
2022-09-08 clarification about bringing mouse with computer.
2022-08-14 initial publication.

Open Contest

Teams from countries outside the NCPC countries, or teams who can’t participate at a site can instead participate in the open contest, starting one hour after the official contest with the same problem set: https://open.kattis.com/contests/ncpc22open.

Site Director

Each site has a site director. The site director is responsible for running the local site during the contest, preferably with the help of a local group. The following conditions should be met at each site:

Participating teams should be seated in a designated area with one table per team and ample space between teams.
Each team should have close access to a power outlet for their computer.
Each team should receive 3 printed copies of the problem statements in a sealed envelope in the minutes before the contest, which they may open once the contest starts.

The problem statements will be emailed to the site directors lunch time the 7th of October. For each team, print three copies of the problem statements and put them in a sealed envelope.

The participants will use their own Kattis accounts to access their teams at https://ncpc22.kattis.com/contests/ncpc22. There will be Kattis accounts created for participants who do not already have an account. They will receive an email about this the day before the contest.

If you as site director plan to hand out balloons during the contest, there is a balloon system inside Kattis. To get access to the system, send your Kattis username to Pehr Söderman pehrs@kattis.com.

Organizers

NCPC director:	Fredrik Niemelä (Kattis)	`fredrik@kattis.com`
Head of Jury:	Nils Gustafsson (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
Technical Director:	Pehr Söderman (Kattis)	`pehrs@kattis.com`
Webmaster:	Måns Magnusson (Lund University)	`exoji2e@gmail.com`

Last updated: 2022-10-07

Webmaster: Måns Magnusson exoji2e@gmail.com