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Internet Problem Solving Contest 2004
misof writes "The sixth year of the annual Internet Problem Solving Contest (IPSC) will take place on Friday May 21st. IPSC is one of world's largest online programming contests with over 600 teams from more than 50 countries participating last year. The main purpose of IPSC is to compare problem solving skills of people from around the world and, of course, to have fun.
IPSC is not oriented on a specific programming language instead you are given the input data and may produce the output data by any means. (This could actually be THE way to show your friends the superiority of both your skills and your favourite programming environment!) The contest is open for everybody and we invite you to participate!"
That sucks!
Are you supposed to win if you can write the basic datastructures, trees, etc, faster than anyone else?
That's not a very interesting competition then.
Half of the work is to understand the problem. The rest is to tell a computer to do stuff to find the solution. It shouldn't matter how you tell it to do stuff. The point is that you should try to learn as many tools as possible and be allowed to use them.
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
As I read it, they're not prohibiting you from using libraries for basic datastructures like trees, but from using libraries for things like symbolic algebra and graph algorithms. The example given, LEDA, contains basic datastructures but it also contains MSTs, max flow algorithms, BFS, convex hull, ... The competition is about problem solving, not real-life programming, so it's perfectly reasonable to let people use their favorite language rather than require them to do some research into which libraries are available for the languages permitted.
The ACM Contest is similiar; it's linked at the bottom of the IPSC website. You have 5 hours to do 6-9 problems. Most are a real pain and brute force usually won't work... it needs to be time and memory efficient. But it's fun. Their website has a ton of problems, like 10,000+, and you can submit to there online judge... it always gives me something to do on Friday/Saturday nights.
Ardente veritate incendite tenebras mundi
BTW, the organizers are non-English too. I bet you wouldn't be happy if the problems were in Slovak, which is their mother tongue. English is a compromise.
The unenforcable www rule is derived from a similar ACM ICPC contest. In fact a whole team of fifty PhD. software engineers with three computers each could work in every problem and the IPSC staff wouldn't notice, so it's all about being fair.