Notes

As you may have noticed the Newsgroup announcements in the previous weeks, we have been conducting Mashup contests to evaluate the interest of our students in competitive programming, in order to prepare them primarily for ACM's International Collegiate Programming Contest. (ICPC)

We are now announcing this year's guidelines by which the department will choose the participants that are going to represent our university in ICPC.

- Candidates' overall performances in the individual contests so far are made available online, in a scoreboard, and the scoreboard is going to be updated regularly. The contestans' performances in online and onsite mashup contests is multiplied by the coefficients 1 and 2, respectively, when being included in the scoreboard.
(see https://tinyurl.com/metuicpcscoreboard for the live scoreboard)
- Attendance is required in onsite mashup contests. Online participation to onsite contests is not to be included in the individual performance scoreboard.

- Starting from the week of March 26, an onsite mashup contest for individuals is going to be held each weekend, and will be followed by an upsolving session. The exact time of the onsite contest will be announced on the Newsgroup every week.

- Onsite mashup contests are planned to take 3 hours, and will consist of approximately 6-7 questions. Once every month, however, the contest will be conducted in the official ICPC format, meaning that it is going to take 5 hours, and will have about 10 problems.

- As of May, weekly training contests for teams will be held. The contests will be in standard ICPC format mentioned previously.

- The department is not planning to manually form the teams, but participants are advised to form their teams until the end of April, before these training contests begin.

- In order to foster competition and training motivation among teams and individuals, individual mashup contests are going to be held even after the suggested team forming date (end of April) and the individual performance scoreboard will be updated. In fact, online individual contests are planned to be held even through the summer, and the details are going to be announced through this Newsgroup until the end of semester.

- The priority of a team in representing our department will be estimated by summing up the individual performances of the team members, and comparing that to the priority of the other teams.

- The department is planning to fund the teams participating to ICPC this year. And, in an effort to use limited funds at hand wisely, besides the criteria mentioned above, the department reserves its right to disqualify individuals or teams from participating to ICPC, based on their participation and efforts (or lack thereof) in the overall training process.