CCC3 Tournament Structure

As you know, this years CCC3 is a three-round tournament. Here's the round structure and details:

• Round One: The first round is a single, online contest. It will be held on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 (Tuesday, Mordad 17th, 1385,) 9 AM. Round one will have no less than 7 problems.
• Round Two: The best 50 people in the online round will be invited to round two, which is an on-site round in the IAUM (in Mashhad,) on Tuesday, August 22nd (Mordad 31st.) They will compete in two groups of 25, in two matches that will be on 9 AM and 3 PM. From each group, (at least) 6 people advance directly to the final round, along with (at least) 4 wildcards (the best among the remaining of both the groups.) The contests in this round will be 3 hours long with 4 problems in each match.
  
• The Finalè: (is that the correct accent?) The best 16 (may be as many as 20, depending on your performance in the second round) will be admitted into the final round. The final round will be a 5-hour match on Wednesday, August 23rd (Shahrivar 1st,) with 6 problems. Eternal glory comes to the winner of this tournament!

There will be an online practice (and test) contest on Friday, August 4th (Friday, the 13th of Mordad!) at 9 AM. This one will be 10 hours long, and will have 8-10 problems. Everyone is invited and encouraged to participate.

Programming Environment in CCC3

I know that many of you are wondering what the available languages/compilers/IDEs (operating systems, etc.) are for this CCC. Well, wonder no more!

The operating system will be Microsoft Windows XP (possibly with Service Packs). The machines will be normal standard PCs (what else will Windows run on? It's not like it's cross-platform or portable or opensource.) On top of that, Emacs (21.3) will be available too, for those who cannot work with Windows and need a more powerful piece of software!

In the on-site rounds, the available languages/compiler/IDEs are :

1. C++/Microsoft C++ Compiler 13.10/Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 (MSVC 7.1) : This is better than the monstrosity of VS 2005, and the compiler is much more standard-compliant than 7.0 and 6.0.
2. C++/GCC 3.4 (MinGW)/None or GCC 4.1 (DJGPP)/RHIDE : We will definitely have GCC, but whether it is the MinGW system or the DJGPP one, you can help us decide. Please comment on each of these options (and others,) otherwise, we'll decide on one and let you know later.
   
3. Java/Sun JDK 1.5.0-04/Java Studio Enterprise 8 : OK, I admit. I don't use Java on a daily basis (who am I kidding? Not even on a monthly basis!) If you have any suggestions about a better Java IDE, and you actually have a reason for it (aside from "I like it better!") please leave a comment here and let us know.
4. C#/Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 with CSC 7.10/Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 : Is there anybody out there who uses Mono on Windows? Why? (I admire you for that!)
   
5. Object Pascal/Borland Delphi Compiler/Borland Delphi 7 : What can I say? Some people need this.

Now, you can ask for other configurations, you can ask for other IDEs, etc. Here's what you can't ask for:

• Other operating systems. It's just too much work for us. And let's face it, it's not going to matter in the course of the tournament (unless of course, the stupid XP theme thing is used, which may cause temporary or permanent blindness! Or the XP start menu, which kills 10000 brain-cells every time opened! Believe you me, that's scientific fact!)
• Other languages. You cannot ask for Visual Basic, because I hate it. You cannot ask for perl, python or lisp, because they're way too powerful. Gives an unfair advantage! Languages other than these are -- well, I can't say useless -- but a little obscure. We don't feel comfortable having languages we don't know well.

If you've read so far, please leave a comment, stating your prefered language, and other comments you may have.

Thanks!

Signup Emails, Contest Schedule and a Lost Bet

We have a mail-sender daemon in KOPCS now, and it works! OK, it's not a daemon, but it does what it's supposed to do, and it has no interaction with users. It's written in Python in about 120 lines (mostly boilerplate or superfluous--why did I put them in then?) including parsing of command files and email templates.
What it all means is that from now on, all signup details will be emailed back semi-automatically (I haven't got cron to work correctly yet.) Also, note that there has been reports of spam filters trapping emails sent from KOPCS (probably for good reason, but don't ask what those are!) So you may want to set up a filter in your mail server or provider to prevent this. On the other hand, the emails KOPCS is going to send you are only the signup confirmation and possibly a per-contest schedule, and you should already know all the schedule for IAUM CCC 3.

That lands us on the second topic. If you log in to KOPCS and go to the "contests" page (the double border was not my idea!), you'll notice that there are four contests defined but all are disabled. That's because I haven't got time to upload the problems for them, so they are disabled. Note the dates and times. And remember, except for the first one (the "Internal KOPCS Test 01", which you can't take part in, unless you are engaged up to your elboes in CCC3) you have to register in the said registration period to be able to compete at all.

Now I get to the embarrassing part. I had a bet that the number of people who signed up would not reach 100 before today (July 23rd, Mordad 1st) but it did. We had ~110 signed up members at the end of yesterday. I won't embarrass myself anymore by saying what the stakes were, but I'll say that although I have lost, I'm not gonna do it!

UPDATE: Eureka! I got cron to work! I don't know why that would have been important for you, but still!

The Very Beginning

Hi people!

This is the official IAUM-CCC 3 weblog. You can subscribe to the RSS feed or check this space from time to time to check on the status of the competition!