Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest 2021
09 Oct 2021 - E-building
10:00 - 17:00
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.
Contest links
The constest is run on https://ncpc21.kattis.com.
A solution walk through will be streamed at 16:15 at https://youtu.be/7tPmFRIH6ng.
Schedule of the on site event
9th of October
| Time | Place | |
|---|---|---|
| 10:00 - 10:30 | E:A | Last minute information |
| 11:00 - 16:00 | Where ever in the E-building or At home | The contest |
| 16:00 - 16:15 | Pizzas outside of E:A | |
| 16:00 - 17:00 | Streamed from E:A | Solution session & Prize ceremony |
This year you participate from your own computers (please read the rules below). It will be possible to participate both on site (in the E-building) and from home.
Sponsors & Prizes
Apptus sponsors the LTH-site contest this year. The top 3 student teams will receive diplomas and a dinner/lunch with Apptus.
Also the top student teams will have the possibility to participate in the regional contest NWERC, which will take place the 20th-21st of November.
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 department of Computer Science at Lund University, and has since been organized yearly. In 1996 it became the Swedish Championships, and in 2011 it became the Nordic Championships. At http://cs.lth.se/contest/ information, images and previous scoreboards are archived.
Rules
Due to Covid-19 the rules have changed since 2019 and before. 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 allowed to use pre written code in 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 1998 or later
- Started studying at Lund University 2017 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 2021 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 192 teams solved problem M, but no teams solved problem L.
If you wish to help spread the word about NCPC, please attend our facebook event, and invite your friends!