Competition Rules

These Competition Rules cover Competition Procedures and Judging Procedures. This draft may be revised to address omissions or inconsistencies, but will not change substantially.

The final version will be presented at the first GA meeting of IOI 2022. Important changes from IOI 2021 are marked in red.

Delegation Leaders have the responsibility to ensure that all members of their delegation fully understand these rules and abide by them.

An updated version of the IOI syllabus can be found here. Current approved IOI Regulations can be found at https://ioinformatics.org/files/regulations21.pdf.

For IOI Code of Conduct, follow this link.

Tasks

The source program provided by the contestant must be contained in one source file as specified in the task statement.

Submissions must not perform explicit input and output operations; instead data must only be exchanged through the interfaces specified in the task statement. In particular, direct access to any file, including standard input or standard output, is forbidden (though writing to standard error is allowed).

Using multiple threads is allowed. Note that the running time of the submission will be counted as a sum of running times of all threads. E.g. if there were two threads running for 5 seconds each (thus, the program finishes in 5 seconds), then the running time of the submission will be 10 seconds.

Each task will be divided into several subtasks, each worth a portion of the total points.

Time and memory limits will be specified for every task. In general, time and memory limits will be generous (for example, double those required by the expected solution). The memory limit is on the overall memory usage including executable code size, stack, heap, etc.

For each programming task, the contestants can download a zip file for a programming task from the grading system. The zip file contains interface files, a sample grading program, and a skeleton implementation of a required source file. The skeleton exercises an interface, but it does not solve the problem. The sample grader provided on the workstation would not be the same as the official grader used by the grading system.

Competition Schedule

There will be two competition days. On each day contestants will be given three tasks to complete in 5 hours.

Practice Session

There will be a 2 hour Practice Competition prior to the first competition day, to familiarize all contestants with the grading system.

The practice tasks will be published before the IOI. Contestants may bring printed solutions to the practice tasks, on paper only, during the Practice Competition.

Quarantine

In order to protect the confidentiality of the tasks, all direct and indirect contacts and communication between contestants and delegation leaders are prohibited between the moment where tasks for a competition day are presented to the members of the GA and the end of the competition on the following day. During this period the contestants are not allowed to communicate by any means, direct or indirect, with any member of the GA or anyone who knows the tasks. The GA members are not allowed to communicate task-related information to anyone who may not attend GA meetings. The contestants, the GA members and anyone else who has had access to the tasks must obey any instructions which restrict their access to specific parts of the IOI venue.

If a contestant violates the quarantine, the contestant can be subject to disqualification. If some other person associated with a national delegation violates the quarantine, then all contestants of that delegation may be subject to disqualification.

Competition Equipment and Environment

Please refer to the Contest Environment page.

Task Statements

Each contestant will receive the official English version of tasks in an envelope on each contest day. For those contestants who requested the translation of the tasks, an additional version of the tasks in the requested language will be provided in the same envelope with the English version.

Each contestant will have online access to the official English version of tasks and all task translations in electronic format (PDF).

Finally, working paper and Clarification Request Forms will be on paper and provided for each contestant.

Supplies

In the competition room, blank paper, writing tools, snacks and water will be provided. On the competition days, contestants may not bring anything into the competition rooms, except for the following items under the proviso that they cannot transmit or store any data in electronic or printed format (other than the purpose for which they have been designed):

  • clothing,
  • reasonable jewelry,
  • ID badge (provided by the IOI 2022 organizing committee)
  • writing utensils,
  • keyboards (without wireless, calculation, and/or programmable functions),
  • mouse (without wireless and/or calculation functions) and mouse pads,
  • small mascots,
  • English dictionaries,
  • snacks
  • medicine and medical equipment
  • earplugs and earmuffs

Bringing items with the exception of clothing, jewelry and ID badge into the competition room requires prior approval from the IOI 2022 Technical Committee. A contestant must submit these items to the technical staff during the practice competition day to use on the first competition day and must resubmit them during the time of analysis of the first competition day to use on the second competition day. The technical committee checks the submitted items immediately and informs the contestants whether their items are approved or not. A contestant must submit these items by leaving them in a designated container provided by the technical committee on their workstation during the practice competition day.

As soon as the practice competition day is over, the technical committee will check the submitted items. If there are rejected items, the delegation leader of the contestant will be notified and they are allowed to resubmit replacements. The approved items will be kept by the technical committee and given to the contestants at the start of each competition day. However, during the contest, the technical committee may decide to remove any of these approved items if they deem that the item’s usage is disruptive to other contestants during the contest.

After the first competition day is over, a contestant must leave the submitted items in the same designated container provided by the technical committee on their workstation if they want to continue using these items on the second competition day.

At the end of the practice contest and each the first competition day, any unsubmitted items left on the contestants’ workstation will be cleared and not returned to the contestants. Hence, contestants should take all items with them at the end of the practice contest and each competition day.

At the end of the second competition day, contestants should take all the submitted items with them.

Any attempts to bring any other items unlisted above into the competition rooms are considered cheating. In particular, the following items are strictly prohibited on the competitions:

  • any computing equipment (e.g. calculators, laptops, tablets),
  • any keyboards or mice with wireless, calculation or programmable functions
  • any books, manuals, written or printed materials,
  • any data storage medium (e.g., CD-ROMs, USB drives, flash cards, micro-drives),
  • any communication devices (e.g., mobile phones, radios of any sort),
  • watches of any type,
  • any earphones, headphones, microphones and speakers.

For the case of snacks, host organizing committee will provide all contestants with some amount of snacks. In cases when a contestant would still like to bring in snacks, contestant should make sure that the snacks are not noisy or smelly, and are not disturbing for other contestants in any other way. In case of complaint from other contestant during contest, the snack might be removed.

Any electronic or printed materials provided by the organizers during a competition round may be used by the contestants (e.g., a Users Guide to the Contest System, or any electronic documentation or reference manuals provided in the installed contest environment or on the provided grading system).

Starting the Competition

All contestants must wear their ID badges during the competition. Each contestant will have a pre-assigned workstation. Contestants should be in their seats by at least 5 minutes prior to the start of the competition.

Contestants must find their assigned computer, sit down, and wait for the competition to begin without touching anything (such as keyboards, mice, pen or paper).

Assistance and Clarification

During the competition, contestants may ask questions concerning competition tasks, rules and/or grading. Such questions would be considered Clarification Requests and should either be submitted using the grading system, or by writing them on the Clarification Request Forms. Contestants will receive a reply from the Scientific Committee via the grading system, or the Scientific Committee will write the reply on the submitted Clarification Request Form and they will be returned to the contestants. If the contestants require more forms, they should raise their hand to call for the support staff.

Clarification Requests may be expressed either in the contestant’s preferred language or in English. However, on the grading system, contestants may not be able to type the characters required for their preferred language. In that case, contestants should write their questions on the Clarification Request Forms instead.

If required, delegation leaders will translate the Clarification Requests into English after they are submitted and before they are sent to the Scientific Committee. Since this might take some time, contestants should continue working while waiting for the answers to their questions.

Contestants should phrase their Clarification Requests so that a yes/no answer will have a clear meaning. Contestants should not ask negative questions such as “Isn’t it true that…?” because the yes/no answer to such questions may cause confusion depending on the native language of the contestants. Instead, positive questions of the form “Is it true that…?” are recommended.

Clarification Requests will be answered with one of the following:

  • “Yes”
  • “No”
  • “Answered in Task Description (Explicitly or Implicitly)” – The clarification is answered in task description (explicitly or implicitly). The contestant should read it again carefully.
  • “Invalid Question (not a Yes/No Question)” – The question is most likely not phrased so that a yes/no answer would be meaningful. The contestant is encouraged to rephrase the question.
  • “No Comment” – The contestant is asking for information that the Scientific Committee cannot give.

Additional elaboration of the answer may be provided if the Scientific Committee deems it to be necessary.

Questions not concerning competition tasks, rules and/or grading would be considered as Assistance Requests. These Assistance Requests should be made via a system available on the contestants’ machine. These Assistance Requests should be made by raising a colored card available on the contestant’s desk depending on the type of the request.

For any other Assistance Requests, or in the case that the system is not available, contestants should raise their hand to call the support staff for assistance.

Contestants should not leave their seats until allowed to do so by the support staff. The staff members will not answer questions about the competition tasks, but will deliver Clarification Request Forms and printouts, help locate toilets and refreshments, and assist with computer and network problems.

Contestants should never attempt to fix or debug or even check computer or network problems themselves; instead, they should ask for assistance.

Grading System

There is no restriction on the number of times a program may be edited, compiled, and run on the workstation. The workstations have network access to the grading system, as well as facilities such as printing and solution submission. Grading and evaluation take place on the grading system, which provides a similar execution environment for every solution submission.

Grading workstations will be provisioned on similar hardware as the contestant’s workstations. However, due to differences in software configurations, it is not guaranteed that contestant workstations and grading workstations will have a similar execution environment.

Submitting

Contestants must submit their solutions for tasks by using the grading system. To avoid overloading the grading system, there are three restrictions on the number of submissions:

  • Contestants may submit a solution to each task at most once per minute. This restriction does not apply in the last 15 minutes of the contest round.
  • Contestants may submit at most 50 solutions for each task. This limit may be increased for some task types.
  • Each submitted source program must be written in C++, it must be smaller than 256 50 KiB, the evaluation server must be able to compile it in less than 10 seconds and at most 512 MiB of memory.

Note that Java is not available in since IOI 2021.

For exceptional circumstances, the Scientific Committee and Technical Committee may provide alternative methods for contestants to submit their solutions instead of the grading system. The submission using the alternative methods must be accompanied by an appeal. The Scientific Committee will then consider to include such submissions to be official.

Scoring

The scores will be calculated as follows:

  • For each submission, the score for each test case is calculated according to your program or output.
  • For each submission, the score for each subtask is the minimum of the scores for the test cases in the subtask unless otherwise stated in the task statement.
  • The final score for each subtask is the maximum of the scores for this subtask across all submissions.
  • The final score for each task is the sum of the scores for its subtasks. This sum is rounded to the nearest 2 decimal places.

For example, consider a contestant who made two submissions on a task that contains two subtasks. If the first submitted solution got 30 points for the first subtask and 10 points for the second subtask, and the second solution got 0 points for the first subtask and 40 points for the second subtask, then the final score for this task will be 70.

Feedback

Contestants can use the grading system to view the status of their submissions and get a short report on the compilation errors of their source code.

For every submission, the grading system reports the score for each subtask. If a subtask is not fully solved, the grading system gives a feedback only for the first test case among the lowest scored test cases in the subtask. The feedback includes the test case number and one of the following reasons:

  • Output is correct
  • Output isn’t correct
  • Execution timed out
  • Execution killed (could be triggered by violating memory limits)
  • Execution failed because the return code was nonzero
  • Protocol Violation

A contestant may receive a “Protocol Violation” feedback if their program does not follow the correct protocol described in the problem statement. Some possible reasons for a submission receiving this feedback include:

  • Calling a grader function with invalid parameters
  • Reading from standard input or printing to standard output
  • Calling exit()

However, it should be noted that submissions that exhibit the above behavior may not always result in “Protocol Violation” feedback and the list above is also not exhaustive.

For tasks with partial scores, instead of “Output is correct” or “Output isn’t correct”, the feedback gives “Accepted” or “Wrong Answer”. “Accepted” means that the submission produced a correct answer. Still, it might not get the full score, due to scoring rules explained in the task statement. “Wrong Answer” means the submission has violated some constraints or produced an incorrect answer. If necessary, the precise meanings of “Accepted” and “Wrong Answer” will be clarified in the task statement.

For tasks with partial scores, the “Output is partially correct” reason might also be given.

The test cases are ordered the same way in all the submissions. No information on the actual data, the output produced by the contestant solution or any other execution details will be given to the contestant.

It should be noted that the score reported in the feedback is only provisional. There are two ways how this score may change after it has been reported to the contestant:

  • Due to a successful appeal after the contest.
  • In some cases the contestants’ submissions may be re-evaluated. This re-evaluation may sometimes lead to a different total score (e.g., if a solution behaves nondeterministically or runs very close to the time or memory limit). In such cases, the final score for the submission is the score for its latest re-evaluation. This change in scoring cannot be appealed. Note that the final score for each subtask is still the maximum score over all submissions.

Testing Interface

Testing Interface is not available in IOI 2022. To test programs, contestants may use their workstations, or submit to the grading system.

Printing

Contestants are allowed to print their solutions to the tasks, i.e., source code, writings, drawings, etc. Contestants are not allowed to print more than 10 pages at once. After a contestant requests that a document is printed, the support staff will deliver the printout to the contestant. Contestants should not leave their computers to find printouts. Printouts will be delivered as quickly as possible, though very large volumes may produce delays in delivery.

Ending the Competition

Three warnings will be given at 15 minutes, 5 minutes, and 1 minute before the end of the competition. Each warning will be given by an audible signal. The end of the competition will be announced both verbally and by an audible signal. At the announcement ending the competition, contestants must immediately stop working and wait quietly at their desks without touching the computers or anything on their desks. An additional announcement will be made instructing them to leave their tables and exit the competition room.

If a contestant thinks that they should be given extra time for the competition, they should send a Clarification Request either through the contest system or via a Clarification Request Form as early as possible. They should not leave their desk or talk to other contestants nor team leaders after the contest ends and continue to work. A member of the Scientific Committee will then decide whether to award the extra time, and inform the contestant of the decision. If some amount of extra time is granted, all submissions that are made during contest time + extra time would be graded. For online contests, the team leader and/or the proctor(s) need to provide the Scientific Committee detailed information and precise timing of the issue the earliest possible.

However, the following issues will not be accepted as grounds for requesting for extra time:

  • Issues arising from the usage of IDEs and debuggers (such as Code::Blocks and Eclipse). Contestants are to take responsibility for their choice of IDEs and debuggers and be competent in their usage. However, members from the technical committee may provide assistance.
  • The contestant loses a significant amount of time when trying to solve technical issues by themselves.
  • Instances where the contestant did not inform any support staff or made any clarification request on the issue at all.

Cheating

Contestants must use only the workstation and account assigned to them on each competition day. In particular:

  • contestants must not attempt to submit illegal programs as discussed above, nor try to tamper with or compromise the grading system;
  • contestants must not attempt to gain access to root or any account other than the one assigned to them;
  • contestants must not attempt to store information in any part of the file system other than the home directory for their account or the /tmp directory;
  • contestants must not touch any workstation other than the one assigned to them;
  • contestants must not attempt to access any machine on the network or the Internet, other than to access the contest system for usual purposes (e.g. submitting tasks, viewing submission results, downloading sample data, submitting Clarification Requests), and call for the support staff through the system, and print documents; even running a single “ping” command is strictly prohibited and may lead to disqualification;
  • contestants must not attempt to reboot or alter the boot sequence of any workstation;
  • contestants must not communicate with other people during the competition, other than the support staff, and/or Scientific/Technical Committee members;
  • contestants must not reverse engineer the test data in order to solve the problems in highly test-data-dependent manners. One example of such behavior is using the feedback system to extract the test data and then applying this knowledge to build solutions adapted to the specific test cases in the grading system. This behavior would be considered cheating only if a contestant submits a solution that would solve significantly fewer test cases correctly if the test data were replaced by an equivalent set of test cases (e.g., one generated with a different random seed).

All of the above actions are considered cheating, and may result in disqualification.

Appeal Process

Submitted solutions are evaluated using data which conform to the specification given in the problem statement, but which are hidden from contestants during the competition.

Provisional grades, based on these tests, are available immediately to contestants. In the event of an error with the test data, the Scientific Committee will attempt to, but is not obligated to follow the following process:

  • Every attempt will be made to fix test data and regrade all solutions as quickly as possible.
  • Additional test data may be added only when the grading data does not meet the intention of the Scientific Committee from before the contest.
  • Late detections of issues, especially during the last 2 hours of the contest, may be grounds for extending the length of the contest.

This hidden data will be made available electronically in the competition area during the scheduled time for analysis after each competition. Contestants and team leaders may use the contestant’s workstations to verify that the grades are assessed correctly.

A Team Leader may file an appeal by completing an Appeal Form, and submitting it to the Scientific Committee at least 30 minutes prior to the final GA meeting of that competition day according to IOI 2022 schedule. The GA will be informed of where Appeal Forms can be collected, and where they can submit them to the Scientific Committee. Every appeal will be reviewed by the Scientific Committee and the team leader will be notified of the committee’s decision. All appeals and their disposition will be summarized at the final GA meeting of for that competition day. In the event that every submission of a task should be re-graded and re-scored as a consequence of an accepted appeal, note that re-scoring may result in a higher or lower score for any contestant. Should anyone’s score change after grading results have been published, new results will be published again. Score changes resulting from this are not appealable.

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