Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest 2020
07 Nov 2020 - Online
11:00 - 16:00
The Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest (NCPC) is the Nordic Championships in Competitive programming in teams for university students. Both student teams and professional teams are welcome to participate.
Final results
The top three student teams in Lund were:
- Hookup Table (9 solved problems) 1st in Sweden
- ezpc (8 solved problems) 2nd in Sweden
- SebbiASK56 (6 solved problems) 5th in Sweden
Congratulations! The contest went really well for the Lund University teams - many teams solved 4 or more problems, and 6 out of the top 10 student teams in Sweden were from Lund!
We hope you had a lot of fun, and also learned something!
There are some upcoming programming contests/challenges you might enjoy:
- Advent of Code - Starting 1st of Dec 2020
- LTH Challenge - February/March 2021
- Google Hashcode - February/March 2021
The contest is available at https://ncpc20.kattis.com/standings. When the contest starts anyone can have a look at the problems!
We are happy to announce that there are 26 teams from Lund competing. 13 are student teams, representing a majority of the Swedish student teams!
After the contest (about 16:10) there will be a live streamed solution walkthrough.
There will be no on-site event due to new recommendations in Skåne regarding Covid-19. It will only be possible to participate online.
Practice Contests
- There is an online practice contest organized by the NCPC-jury the 31st of October.
- We will host an online practice contest with problems from previous NCPC contests the 3rd of November.
Registration
Register your 3 member team before the 4th of November.
Each team member needs an account in the ICPC registration system. However the team should only be registered once by one member.
If you wish to help us spread the word about the contest, please select “Going” at our Facebook event - and invite your friends!
Schedule of the on site event
7th November.
| Time | Place | |
|---|---|---|
| 11:00 - 16:00 | Online | The contest |
| 16:00 - 17:00 | Online | Solution session |
Sponsors & Prizes
Apptus sponsors the LTH-site contest this year. The top 3 student teams will recieve diplomas and a dinner/lunch with Apptus. You will be contacted by email after the contest!
Also the top student teams will have the possibility to participate in the regional contest NWERC, which will take place early 2021.
About NCPC
NCPC is an annual 5 hour contest where your team are given 8-13 algorithmic problems to solve.
The problems vary greatly in difficulty, from beginner level to extremely hard.
Solve each problem by:
- Writing a program in one of the supported programming languages
- Test it locally on your computer with the sample test cases
- Submit it to the online judge system Kattis.
- Wait for the results on the secret test cases.
Kattis will tell you if your program:
- Was Correct (Accepted)
- Produced the wrong output (Wrong Answer)
- Ran too slow (Time Limit Exceeded)
- Crashed (Run Time Error)
If you submit a program which is not correct, but you later in the contest solve the problem, you receive some penalty time for the incorrect attempt.
At LTH this contest is used as the qualifier for the regional contest NWERC. The top student teams that are ICPC-eligible will advance to NWERC.
The contest was created in Lund in 1991 by Roy Andersson at the depatrment of Computer Science at Lund University, and has since been organised yearly. In 1996 it became the Swedish Championships, and in 2011 it became the Nordic Champinships. At http://cs.lth.se/contest/ information, images and previous scoreboards are archived.
Rules
Due to Covid-19 the rules have changed since previous years. In short:
- A team consists of 1 - 3 team members
- You participate on your own computers - from home or on site.
- You are allowed you use the internet during the contest
- You are not allowed to ask anyone outside your team for help. It is also forbidden to put up questions on forums or in chat groups.
- Your team is ranked by the number of problems you solve, and then by penalty time.
Your team is ICPC-eligible (can compete in the student contest) if all team members fulfills the following criteria:
- Born in 1997 or later
- Started studying at Lund University 2016 or later
- Is still enrolled at Lund University.
If these criteria does not hold for all team members, your team instead participate in the open contest.
The full rules can be found at the official NCPC 2020 website.
Tips
If you have not previously participated in NCPC a great way to prepare is to have a look at the problems from last year. Solve the problems ordered by how many people solved them during the contest - marked by green on the scoreboard. For example last year over 200 teams solved problem H, but no teams solved problem D.