2007 ACM Contest Winners Announced

prostoalex writes "2007 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is over with Warsaw University (Poland) winning it this year and solving all of the problems. The runner-up, Tsinghua University (China), finished with 7 problems solved, while St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics (Russia) and MIT (USA) are tied up for the third place with 6 problems solved. There were 6000 teams initially in the running, and in the final round of the competition only 88 remained."

Comments

Why MIT lost

[Simon Garlick]

They forgot about Poland!

But the judging data was screwed up (again)

[gvc]

Many teams lost untold time on J because the judge data did not meet the input specification.

ICPC has had this problem before. Four times in my direct experience, most notably ICPC World Finals 2000 at which they refused to acknowledge their error until weeks later.

This year the data for problem J was wrong, so teams got "run time error" instead of "wrong answer;" many spent vast amounts of time trying to find the source of their crash when in fact it was the judges' fault. All submissions were rejudged at the eleventh hour, when it was too late to fix the problem or to move on to another question.

There is really no excuse for this sort of error. Published guidelines make it clear that input checkers should be written for all problems, yet the finals judges don't bother, and the finals organization imposes no standard on them to do so. Furthermore, the organizers refuse to release any information about the test sets, so we have no idea how many screwups have been covered up.

Here is a list of data errors for which I have first-hand knowledge. I'm sure there are many more.

Finals '97 -- Problem C has ambigous output but the
                            judges rejected some correct solutions
                            (all but their expected one?) Complaints
                            were responded to with "no response."

Finals '98 -- Problem D had empty lines in the input,
                            contrary to the specification.

Finals '00 -- The infamous graph that was not connected,
                            contrary to the problem spec (Problem F)

Finals '07 -- Problem J was supposed to have maximum size
                            64, but was 100. Rejudged in the last hour
                            of contest. Many submissions changed from
                            run-time or time limit to wrong answer.

I am at a loss to understand why the organizers fail to implement better quality control, and why they refuse to release the data and solutions. Bad calls will happen, but the lack of quality control and the lack of transparency exacerbates the problem considerably. These failures, in my opinion, detracts substantially from the contest.

Gordon Cormack
Coach, Waterloo ACM Team