2023-24 South Central Regional Contest

We will use the same Zoom address for all zoom meetings. Meeting ID: 898 7767 0098

environment.avi Is a video that briefly describes the contest environment and explains how to print.

Kattis info will tell you a little bit about Kattis. This is from last year and some things have changed. But it is stll a good thing to watch if you are not adept at Kattis (the tool you will use to submit your solutions).

Note: The above video has been updated and split into two parts:

• Environment
• Kattis

Thanks VanB for these videos!

Each time will use one of the team member’s Kattis login to actually log into Kattis for the practice and the Regional contest. Make sure you bring your username and password with you. make SURE that the one you plan to use does NOT use alternative authentication. During contest you will not have access to the alternate sites to authenticate. You must login with your Kattis ID and password.

When the contest is over, all team members should be able to login to Kattis and see the team submissions regardless of which ID was used during contest. This means you do not need to worry about printing your code or dumping it to a USB key. You might consider submitting partially writen code for a problem (that has not been solved to Kattis), so that you will have it. Submission points to not impact your score for unsolved problems.

Sumbmissions that receive Compile Error will NOT be charged the 20 minute time penalty.

Registration will be open until 1 week before contest (February 16, 2024). ICPC says registration must be complete by 1 week before Regional Contest (ICPC Regional Rules). Registration deadline is February 16, 2024.

Registration is $180 per team (3 team members and 1 coach). Additional guests are $50 each. Upon completed registration, you will receive and invoice from SCUSA.

The ICPC South Central, South East and Mid Atlantic Programming Contests are joining together to form the Big South. Our regional will still continue. The top three teams from our regional (as well as from the other two regionals) will advance to the North America Championship.

All three contests will use the same problem set and have a merged scoreboard available. All other advancement spots from the combined regions will be taken from the merged scoreboard (after eliminating the nine already promoted teams. As always, only one team per school will advance.

Here are links to the three Regions that make up the Big South:

• Mid-Atlantic USA
• Southeast USA
• South Central USA

This year we will support two divisions: 1 and 2. Division 1 is the normal regional grouping from previous years. Division 2 is intended for less experienced teams and features a different problem set that is a little less challenging than the Division 1 problem set. Some problem(s) may be common to both problem sets.

When you register a team, you will see that each site has a Divison 1 and a Diivision 2 version. Pick the appropriate combination. Schools may have some team(s) Division 1 and other team(s) in Division 2.

Teams advancing to the ICPC North America Championship will be taken from the top of Division 1 (only teams that solve at least one problem). If not enough teams in Division 1 solve a problem, then selection will continue into Division 2.

Note that if a school has teams in both divisions, the teams from that school in Division 2 will not be eligible to place (to ensure as many schools as possible get recognized).

A practice contest will be held prior to Regional. It will start on February 24^th at 10:30 AM (Central Time) and will run for thirty minutes.

Here are some questions that have been asked and the answers we have provided:

• Will prizes be awarded?
  No prizes are planned to be awarded this year. Winners and first to solve will be acknowledged on the web site.
• Are we allowed to chose which programming language we use on a case by case basis for each question?
  During Regional, Kattis will accept submissions in C, C++, Java, Kotlin and Python 3. You may use any of these languages on any submission. We do not guarantee that Python can solve all problems in the time/memopry limits.
• What materials may the teams take with them during contest?
  Teams are allowed to have non-machine readable, non-sentient, non-computation items (books, printouts, stuffed animals, clocks, pens, pencils, …). Phones, music devices, smart watches, … are not allowed (basically anything electronic). Simple clocks/time pieces are okay. Obviously the teams have limited work area, so the stuff they take may impact there available work space. A site may have more restrictive rules. Food and/or drinks will be site dependent.

• Regional Contest Directors: Kathy and Isaac Traxler
• Sites
  • Louisiana State University Computer Science: Dr. Bijaya Karki
  • University of Houston Site Director: Dr. Nouhad Rizk
  • University of Oklahoma Site Director: Andy Fagg
  • University of Texas at Dallas Site Director: Bhadrachalam Chitturi
• Technical Support: Keith Johnson
• Contest Control System: Kattis Team
• ICPC Southeast RCD: David Van Brackle
• ICPC Mid-Atlantic RCD: Ian Barland
• ICPC
• ICPC Foundation
• JetBrains
• Your name could be here!

The tentative date for the next Big South/SCUSA Regional is November 16. We NEED sites to host the contest. We would like a site to be able to host a minimum of 10 teams (your school’s teams cannot exceed 50% of the site team count). The Site Director will need to handle the following tasks:

• Coordinate site details
• Provide computer lab(s) for the teams (3 seats, one computer)
• USB key to be used for bootable image (one per machine). We will provide the keys for you to image.
• Provide a meeting room with Internet and AV for the Opening, Rules Review and Results announcement
• Arrange Lunch and food/snacks post contest

We will provide the following:

• One free team registration
• A bootable image to run on your computers
• We will provide USB keys
• A pre-contest time window to test everything
• A portion of registration fee to cover food
• Zoom invites
• A slack channel (maybe discord) for Site Directors and SCUSA staff to communicate
• Web presence to post local info (parking, map, details)

This is a link for more Site Director Information.

We are returning the Regional to its previous (normal Semester). Our next Regional is projected to be November 16^th. We are (as always) looking for sites for that contest.