CCC - Canadian Computer Competition
Hosted annually by university of Waterloo. Open for any highschool student in Canada. Have a chat with your computer science teacher and make him regester you for the event. Regestration fee is $5 per contestant. My school pays for that
It is hosted each year in Febuary. This year its on Febuary 25th. Thats a Tuesday if it helps.
Anyway, there're 2 groups in which you can compeat. Junior and Senior.
To be in Junior you must have 1 computer science credit at most at the time of writing. So you can be taking your 2nd comp-sci class WHILE writing the competition
You must also have not won this competition before (I donno what they mean by that...)
To be in Senior... well anyone else can do that (gotta be in highschool though). Well it's gonna be a tougher crowd as you'll have all those people from grade 12. I sujest applying for Junior division if you're allowed.
There're also 2 stages to the test. Juniors can write only 1st stage.
Stage 1 is held in your school and is 3 hours long. You'd have to solve 5 problems in this time. Each problem is worth 15 marks. Note that problems are increasing in difficulty. Basically Problem1 is easy and Problem5 is hard. All worth the same, so ofcourse you should do as much as you can starting from the beginning.
Stage 2 is held at the university of waterloo. You chill there for couple of days and write a total of 6 problems in 2 days. I'm not sure on how long each day is.
To get into stage 2 you got to be one of top 15 people from stage 1. Though in 2002 about 25 people were invited to stage 2.
Results from stage 2 will de used to makeup Canadas International Olympic team (3 people I think). 2003 international computer competition will be held in Wisconsin, USA. Last year it was in Korea.
Some other things to know:
Juniors write problems 1-5
Seniors write problems 3-7
problems 3,4,5 overlap.
The questions are generally about
mathematical problems
programming
design/analysis of an algorithm
PROGRAMMING languages you can use:
You can use almost any language for Stage 1:
Pascal, Basic, Turing, C/C++. I've personally contacted u of w and they allowed the use of Visual Basic as well.
Stage 2 will be writen in Pascal and/or C/C++ only. (since its on their machines and all)
More then 1 language can be used.
If you have any questions, reply to this topic. If you got some really specific questions, you can e-mail U of Waterloo directly using this e-mail address: cmc@math.uwaterloo.ca
Good thing I was using C++ 
i've never heard of it till now. sounds interesting though.
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