On Site Contest Rules

Solutions to problems submitted for judging are called runs. Each run is judged as accepted or rejected by the judge, and the team is notified of the results. Submitted codes should not contain team or University name and the file name should not have any white space.

Notification of accepted runs will NOT be suspended at the last one hour of the contest time to keep the final results secret. Notification of rejected runs will also continue until the end of the contest. But the teams will not be given any balloon and the public rank list will BE updated as usual in the last one hour.

A contestant may submit a clarification request to judges only through the CodeMarshal clarification system. If the judges agree that an ambiguity or error exists, a clarification will be issued to all contestants. Judges may prefer not to answer a clarification at all in which case that particular clarification request will be marked as IGNORED in the CodeMarshal clarification page.

Contestants are not to converse with anyone except members of their team and personnel designated by the organizing committee while seated at the team desk. They cannot even talk with their team members when they are walking around the contest floor to have food or any other purpose. Systems support staff or judges may advise contestants on system-related problems such as explaining system error messages.

While the contest is scheduled for a particular time length (five hours), the contest director has the authority to alter the length of the contest in the event of unforeseen difficulties. Should the contest duration be altered, every attempt will be made to notify contestants in a timely and uniform manner.

A team may be disqualified by the Contest Director for any activity that jeopardizes the contest such as dislodging extension cords, unauthorized modification of contest materials, distracting behavior or communicating with other teams. The judges on the contest floor will report to the Judging Director about distracting behavior of any team. The judges can also recommend penalizing a team with additional penalty minutes for their distracting behavior.

Nine, ten or eleven problems will be posed. So far as possible, problems will avoid dependence on detailed knowledge of a particular applications area or particular contest language. Of these problems at least one will be solvable by a first year computer science student, another one will be solvable by a second year computer science student and rest will determine the winner.

Contestants will have foods available in their contest room during the contest. So they cannot leave the contest room during the contest without explicit permission from the judges. The contestants are not allowed to communicate with any contestant (even contestants of his own team) or coaches when they are outside the contest arena.

Teams can bring up to 200 pages of printed materials with them but they can also bring five additional books. But they are not allowed to bring calculators or any machine-readable devices like CD, DVD, Pen-drive, IPOD, MP3/MP4 players, floppy disks etc. Mobile phone MUST be switched off at all times and stored inside a bag or any other place that is publicly non visible during the entire contest time. Failure to adherence to this clause under any condition will very likely lead to strict disciplinary retaliation and possible disqualification.

With the help of the volunteers and judges, the contestants can have printouts of their codes for debugging purposes. Passing of printed codes to other teams is strictly prohibited.

The decision of the judges is final.

Teams should inform the volunteers/judges if they don’t get reply from the judges within 10 minutes of submission. Teams should also notify the volunteers if they cannot log in into the CodeMarshal system. These sort of complains will not be entertained after the contest.