.
Your e-mail must include your name, major, degree program, year of
study, and year of birth. We don't need your USC ID number.
If any of this information is missing, we cannot register
you.The Fall 2008 contest was held on Saturday, 09/20/2008. Follow the link for the problem set, sample solutions, test inputs and outputs, and the results.
The USC Programming Contest is an event organized once per semester for undergraduates and beginning graduate students. It is a programming contest for individual participants. This page tries to give you all necessary information about the contest. It answers the following questions:
The contest is open to all students, regardless of year or major, so long as they were born in 1985 or later. Older students are not eligible for the contest.
There are lots of reasons why you would want to participate. First and foremost, we think that it's a fun event. If you are looking for a more material incentive, you can win pretty cool prizes, and every participant gets free pizza and soda. If you make it on the USC team, you get to represent USC at the Regional contest, and might win an all expenses paid trip to the 2009 world finals.
On the more career-oriented side, the contest lets you hone your problem solving skill and gives you practice in programming and solving algorithmic questions. Doing well in the contest looks great on your resume, and in fact, contest sponsors go to great lengths in trying to hire successful contestants.
The time commitment is one Saturday afternoon - this is no long-term project contest. If you are interested, you can improve your chances by practicing beforehand, or try out for USC's teams for the International Contest afterwards. But none of this is mandatory.
The Spring 2009 contest will be held on a Saturday in the Spring semester. The exact date has not been determined yet. The location will most likely be rooms RTH 105/109/115 again. The first hour (1:00-2:00) is always a practice contest, which is highly recommended in order to familiarize yourself with the contest environment. The "real" contest will run from 2:00-6:00. If you want to be kept informed about future contests, subscribe to our contest mailing list.
It's hard for us to predict how difficult the problems will look to any one person. But you should definitely look at some example problems before. Check out the problems from past contests, and the practice links below.
The contest is absolutely free to all participants.
The first four prizes are cash prizes of $400, $300, $200, and $100. In addition, we have computer games sponsored by Electronic Arts that we give out to other high-placing participants. We are also hoping to make this the first contest in which we give out contest T-shirts to all participants.
You can register by sending an e-mail stating so to
.
Your e-mail must include your name, major, degree program, year of
study, and year of birth. We don't need your USC ID number.
If any of this information is missing, we cannot register
you.
So far, there have been seven USC Programming contests. You can see problem sets, sample solutions, results and pictures by following the links below.
The contests are also our USC selection round for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. The ACM ICPC is a huge contest, in which over 1000 schools participate worldwide. The best teams from each region get to go to the world finals.
The best participants at the local contests, as well as anyone who shows specific interest, are invited to try out for the USC teams. During the tryouts, we have simulated contests, and teach you language-specific tricks and algorithms that are commonly necessary in the contest.
The teams will get to represent USC at the Southern California Regional Contest, and if we win, will get an all-expenses paid trip to the world finals. In the first showing since the establishment of the USC Programming Contest, USC's team Cardinal placed 5th out of 66 teams in 2005. In 2006, USC's team Cardinal (Daniel Birken '07, Morgan Brown '08, Kenny Daniel PhD) placed 2nd out of 73 teams, beaten only by CalTech.
You can greatly improve your chances to do well in the contest by practicing beforehand. There are three areas that help:
We try to stick closely to the rules of the world finals, which means that we support Java and C/C++, in the installation available in the lab that we use.
The complete rules are a little lengthy, so they are on their own Rules Page.
Perhaps the most important point: you may bring any printed or written material, but no electronic devices (such as Laptops, hand-held computers, disks, or even calculators).For more information, you can send an e-mail with your question to
.
To be kept up to date on any new announcements regarding the contest, you can subscribe to the USC contest mailing list.
This page is maintained by David Kempe.
Last modified: Tue Sep 23 11:54:52 PDT 2008