World Finals Warmup 1 will run for 18 hours.

[shahriar_manzoor]

World Finals warmup will run for 18 hours. First six hours is the actual contest. And the next 12 hours is to allow teams of other timezones to submit. One ranklist will stop after six hours. But another ranklist will continue for 12 hours more. Ofcourse teams who participated in the six hour contest can continue submitting to find their mistakes.

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Hello, World Finals Warmup 1 is knocking at the door. Please join it to see how the elite problem setters compete to prove their creativity . Will the mere mortals be able to solve Derek and Jimmy or will Rujia Liu provide the knockout punch for all the teams? What will be the nicest easy problem? Which problem will be the time killer? What will be the twist of the geometric problem? Well only time will tell...

It has been seen in previous occasions that the best team of these warmups wins the ICPC World Finals. So participate and have a close look at the ranklist just to guess and bet for your favourite team during the world finals. Cheers!!

[Miguel Angel]

Can you do a parallel contest, such in North and Central America can't be so early, the time the contest starts here is 2,3,4 or 5 am. I don't know if Asia have a similar problem.

Thanks

[shahriar_manzoor]

Actually, there is a problem here. Most of our users are from this side. And for such a schedule I can stay awake and so can our elite problem setters panel (Except derek and prof cormack). But the second contest starts four/five hours later which will be suitable for you. But we will try to make the first contest run after the actual six hours so that you can participate and imagine your position in the ranklist.

The time for the first contest is not stitable only for North and South America. And we cannot start it at say 2GMT because that is not suitable for spain, which is most important (The system personnel must be present during the contest to see that any trouble can be removed).

[Andrey Mokhov]

Hello, everyone!

I just want to know whether ACM ICPC World Finals Warmup - 2 will run longer than 6 hours or not? I suggest that it will run all the 24 hours - it would be great and let contestants from all over the world to take part in it.

And I have another suggestion: I guess there should be not two but three ranklists. I want to add another ranklist that will be identical to the second one (in which we see people starting later) with one exception - there shouldn't be such times as 09:57:48 - such late submissions should be filtered out in this third ranklist. For example, our team want to take part in ACM ICPC World Finals Warmup - 2 but we will start after about 14 hours later (due to our time zone ).We want to know what rank we would take if we start in time. The second ranklist doesn't give us such possibility as there can be teams that continue solving problems after 6 hours and of course they'll take higher rank than our team (because we won't go after 6 hours). So the third ranklist will be the solution to the problem.

Best regards,
Andrey Mokhov.

[mbakht]

An excellent suggestion. It will be great if all the teams (even those participating after the initial 6 hours) are given exactly 6 hours from the time they start.

[Per]

When does a team start? The only thing that could be checked is when they send their first submission, but then we would just get lots of people who first solve all the problems and then submit them all at the same time.

If you begin late, I can't see any good way of checking which position you would had have if you began earlier, other than calculating your time manually and checking with the first ranklist.

[shahriar_manzoor]

Yes I also thought about the loopholes and it is really impossible to check when a team starts. When UVa will implement account for each team where they will need to log in to see the problemset and submit, we will be able to check when a team starts. Ofcourse still the teams which want to reduce their penalty unfairly will be able to do so by openning more than one account. Ofcourse calculating your penalty in the actual contest is easy:

Actual penalty =
UVA penalty - your_starting_time*number_of_solved_problems

[Andrey Mokhov]

Hello!

Yes, you all are right, all this things can't help against unfair teams trying to get best time. But as for my team, we thought to make some silly submission as soon as we start contest just to activate our timer. 20 minutes penalty is usually not so important in the final ranklist. So the timing of our team will be almost fair. (In any case it will be unfair only for our team ). And there is still some possibility that our first submision will be on such problem that we won't even solve - in that case everything is fine and we get absolutely fair time .

This observation even made me think of some problem X which will be, say, A+B problem so that everybody sends it immediately as he starts (and gets AC, I hope ) - and the timer is activated!

I understand that all this is silly against cheaters but I hope this site is to let fair teams to know their strength and not to protect from cheaters. Who they cheat? Themselves, I guess.

Best regards,
Andrey Mokhov.

[Whinii F.]

Yeah, all cheaters are spoilling their own chance, to compete against those world class problem solvers. I don't want to miss such a great chance.

And I strongly believe those who go up in the ranklist will never do that. Isn't it?!

I think it will not annoy to have a third ranklist. (Though I'm going to participate in the right time anyway..)

- Another one from GMT+9 (We will end up in 4AM, I believe.. So, a very subjective opinion haha )

[Per]

OK, some more comments!

But as for my team, we thought to make some silly submission as soon as we start contest just to activate our timer. 20 minutes penalty is usually not so important in the final ranklist. So the timing of our team will be almost fair.

There is actually another issue to think about: if you begin later, you have the advantage of immediately seeing which problems are easy, and which are hard. In particular, you can see that, say, a certain problem which looks very simple has 500 WAs and 3 ACs. OK, I'm exaggerating, but nevertheless, that kind of info is a big help, IMO.

I understand that all this is silly against cheaters but I hope this site is to let fair teams to know their strength and not to protect from cheaters. Who they cheat? Themselves, I guess.

Yes, I'd agree that they cheat themselves. But as Shahriar said, it is easy for you to know your strength, by manually calculating your actual penalty. It seems to me that the purpose of having such a ranklist would be to show others your strength (since they will not take time to calculate your actual penalty manually, but will probably at least look at the extra ranklist).

Don't get me wrong: I don't think it would be the end of the world to have the third ranklist, but I don't think it is worth the effort that it probably is to implement it. The UVa staff seems to have enough to think about as it is.

I'll be doing the last warmup alone anyway, since my team mates have exams that day. But sure, I wouldn't mind seeing the results of some more teams who are going to Prague.

[Andrey Mokhov]

More

if you begin later, you have the advantage of immediately seeing which problems are easy, and which are hard

Yes. I agree that's bad. And there is no solution but organizing something like virtual contests as you probably saw at http://acm.sgu.ru. But I'm not going to agitate you for making such hard system. Just a third ranklist - it's not hard, really, just a new query to database, I guess?

It seems to me that the purpose of having such a ranklist would be to show others your strength

You are right! It's to show it to others. But the others are: our coach, head of CS Dept, head of our University and so on... You know I'm rather lazy person to make ranklist manually and even more to recalc the time of teams I'm interested in... So I want anyone else to do it for me

Best regards,
Andrey Mokhov.