Question about CCC

[Annology]

Hi,
I was wondering that since Stage 1 of CCC is marked in school, is it necessary for the teacher at my school to know the language I'm using? Also, since books and written material are allowed, are we also allowed to bring in notes we made ourselves?
I'm new to the game here, hoping to write ccc this year xD

[Tony]

I believe that the teacher only marks for the execution (right result in a reasonable amount of time), not the quality of code. They just need to be able to run it. There might be sanity checks by Waterloo, should a student qualify for Stage 2.

I don't remember about the allowed material, and http://cemc.math.uwaterloo.ca/contests/computing/details.html doesn't say. Maybe someone else remembers?

If you want to practice for the contest, there's http://dwite.org/ We'll be posting the schedule in the next few days; there are monthly rounds in a format similar to CCC, but you submit solutions online and we get a computer to grade it right away

[mirhagk]

The teacher has to quickly check the code to make sure it isn't:

code:

cout<<"Answer1\nAnswer2\nAnswer3";

And tony, dwite should have a system similar to google code jam, where you upload the output file after downloading the input file.

That way people can write it in any language they want, and if you put a time limit on how long you have after downloading an input until uploading the output, like the google code jam does, it still requires the program to run within a certain time frame.

[Tony]

DWITE aims to match CCC's questions and style, not Code Jam.

[crossley7]

Sweet, can't wait for Dwite this year. Just hope that the Dwite servers don't crash or get hacked this year. See if we can win a round this year or at least get top 5.

[A.J]

Well, we send the teachers a pretty detailed explanation on how to mark the submissions. However, if you don't happen to have a CS teacher as such at your school, then merely get some other teacher to mark it with the help of a senior student (preferably someone who has written the CCC before). I thought Mr.Hughes was still around (I have yet to meet him, and it was been 4 years since we have contacted each other).

[crossley7]

Mr Hughes is still here, so i know we are fine... but it was my friend and I that ended up marking our CCC solutions last year (as I am the only one that has access to a c++ compiler on my laptop and a few people used it). I don't think the original poster is from Crossley though.

It would be awesome though AJ if you could contact him and maybe provide him with some dynamic and recursive type problems... those seem to be the biggest weak point at crossley

[A.J]

Haha, that was how I met Mr.Hughes in the first place. He emailed a friend of mine and I about 4 years ago asking for a few DP problems. I would suggest that you guys come to Waterloo for attending CS clubs here at WCI, but seeing as that's too far maybe we can set up some sort of regional CS club that meets up once a month or so.

[crossley7]

I would love to do that and think that at least a few of my friends would as well (the other guys that went to ECOO provincials last year)

If we did a monthly thing on weekends somewhere, I think we could easily come to Waterloo or somewhere near there or maybe rotate where we meet.

I will talk to them at school monday or before and see what their interest is but I think they would love to have a chance to grow in knowledge of those problems.

[mirhagk]

@Tony I know that the Dwite is supposed to mimic the CCC, which is why I think that any programming language should be allowed. Obviously you can't copy CCC's style, because there aren't teachers to supervise, but the current dwite style is not like the CCC, and the google code jam model would be much more like the CCC, but it'd give the opportunity to use any programming language, which is what the CCC allows (minus symbolic languages). http://cemc.math.uwaterloo.ca/contests/computing/details.html.

I think if you looked at how the google code jam did it, you'd realize that's it's essentially the online version of CCC, and allows for all the things that the CCC allows for, without anything else really. The dwite is not the most accurate online version of the CCC, since it's very specific what you can and can't use.

[Tony]

is there a particular language that you want to use for DWITE that is not currently supported?

[mirhagk]

Well last time C# was only supported by someone compiling it manually, and I know a whole bunch of people who are going to compete this year with that language.

I don't know if that is/will be supported, but even if that specifically gets supported, there is still limitations. I mean do you really want to do all kinds of work every time a new popular language comes along?

[Tony]

That hasn't been a problem yet. Besides, having only public test cases will make this very different from CCC, to a point of either being meaningless or unreasonably difficult.

[mirhagk]

what? How does it make it different? The test cases are only available once the are downloaded, and you may only upload them within 5 minutes (or something similar). Yes of course someone could distribute their "solution" to others, but who's to say that theirs is right? (so long as you don't mark it instantly).

Also note that the google code jam requires people to upload their source code, so you could do the usual similarity check to see if anyone cheated, and a simple sanity check to make sure the code actually calculates something.

I'm open to criticism for the idea, but I don't see how it has any downsides that do not already exist within the current system.

[Tony]

mirhagk @ Fri Oct 14, 2011 7:02 pm wrote:

... requires people to upload their source code...

So we are back to having to compile it on server-side anyway. If there's no compilation, I can just pull a bunch of bits from /dev/random and it will be sufficiently different from every other upload.