Call for Problems¶

The North American Invitational Programming Contest 2015 seeks interesting and challenging programming problems. Problems should have the level of difficulty of World Finals problems, and must be submitted by February 9, 2015. If you are interested in contributing a problem, please read below for how to proceed. Please note that you do not need to submit fully fleshed-out problems. We welcome all contributions, from rough ideas to fully-solved and tested problems.

We also seek volunteers to serve on the Problem Selection Committee. This committee is responsible for putting the problem set together and for judging it.

This CFP is open to anyone, not just participants in the contest. We encourage you to spread it widely.

Submitting Problems¶

Candidate problems should be e-mailed to the Head Judge of the contest, David Van Brackle, at vanb@biltmorecomm.com. A statement of the problem is all that’s necessary, either in text or in MS Word format (right in the e-mail is fine). If you wish to include a solution and/or test data, that’s very, very helpful, but not necessary. If you have a rough idea and want to talk about it, feel free to e-mail the Head Judge.

Coaches of teams participating in the contest are allowed to submit problems. Contestants cannot submit problems.

Below you will find an excerpt from the Call for Problems issued from the World Finals. It’s a good set of guidelines for candidate problems. If you are thinking of submitting a candidate problem, you should read through them:

Each problem must be unambiguously described in English.
All problems must require input.
Unless the core of the problem is input/output related, the formats chosen for input data and the displayed results should be relatively simple. Still, the format of the input data and the appearance of the expected displayed results must be described in suitable detail.
Multiple data sets testing different cases are appropriate; make the problem statement include iterative data sets as input to avoid using separate input files.
Anticipate questions about special cases. Where appropriate, explicitly state that certain special cases will not appear in the input data. It is not necessary to specifically identify the special cases that will appear.
Indicate the precision that is required for real results.
Contestants must write solutions for problems in a short time. While very simple problems are not appropriate, neither are problems that require a great deal of code; a few hundred lines of Java or C should be an upper limit on what can be expected in a solution.
The program and chosen test data should not require excessive execution time. Contestants’ solutions may be less efficient than yours and so a generous margin is allowed for execution. If your test data requires the program to execute for a long time, then incorrect student solutions (e.g., those with infinite loops) will take an excessively long time to judge. We would like to avoid those situations.
The problem description (excluding sample input/output) should generally require at most one page.

Additionally, the following two constraints should also be followed:

The problem should be original. It should not be a restatement of a problem that has been used previously in any ICPC regional, World Finals, or other contest environment such as TopCoder or Google CodeJam. It also should not come from a book, such as “Programming Challenges.” If it has its own Wikipedia page, then it’s too well-known.
The output for any given input should be unique. Try to add constraints to your problem so that there is exactly one answer for each input case.

Problem Selection Committee¶

We’re looking for people to serve on the Problem Selection Committee. The Problem Selection Committee will be responsible for putting the problem set together. This is an intense, rewarding process that takes several weeks of problem evaluation, problem set construction, and quality control. If you’re interested, please contact the Head Judge (vanb@biltmorecomm.com).

Due to the remote structure of this year’s contest, where there will not be major prizes at stake in the contest, coaches of teams participating in the contest are allowed to participate in the Problem Selection Committee this year.