Competitive Programming

The concern over high school dropout rates has been part of the routine of Brazilian public schools. In recent years various public policies have been proposed in an attempt to minimize this problem, nevertheless, federal institutions have sought alternatives to improve the quality of education offered and ensure that students remain attending classes ensuring a high level of learning. This paper describes how Programming Contests can increase the quality of education in the Federal Institutes, as well as foster the inclusion of these students in the job market, playing an important role in combating to school dropouts. As an object of study will be presented Algar Telecom Group shares in the management of Programming Marathon which involves several institutions of higher education, among them the Federal Institute of Triângulo Mineiro (IFTM).

This book is used in Steven's CS3233-'Competitive Programming' course in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore. CS3233 is conducted in 13 teaching weeks using the following lesson plan (see Table 2). The PDF slides (only the public version) are given in the companion web site of this book. Fellow teachers/coaches should feel free to modify the lesson plan to suit students' needs. Hints or brief solutions of the non-starred written exercises in this book are given at the back of each chapter. Some of the starred written exercises are quite challenging and have neither hints nor solutions. These can probably be used as exam questions or contest problems (of course, solve them first!). This book is also used as a supplementary reading in Steven's CS2010-'Data Structures and Algorithms' course, mostly for the implementation of several algorithms and written/programming exercises. Wk Topic In This Book 01 Supporting Websites This book has an official companion web site at sites.google.com/site/stevenhalim, from which you can obtain a soft copy of sample source code and the (public/simpler version) of the) PDF slides used in Steven's CS3233 classes. All programming exercises in this book are integrated in the uhunt.felix-halim.net tool and can be found in the UVa Online Judge at uva.onlinejudge.org New in the third edition: Many algorithms now have interactive visualizations at: www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~stevenha/visualization xv CONTENTS c Steven & Felix Acknowledgments for the First Edition From Steven: I want to thank • God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, for giving me talent and passion in competitive programming. • my lovely wife, Grace Suryani, for allowing me to spend our precious time for this project. • my younger brother and co-author, Felix Halim, for sharing many data structures, algorithms, and programming tricks to improve the writing of this book. • my father Lin Tjie Fong and mother Tan Hoey Lan for raising us and encouraging us to do well in our study and work. • the School of Computing, National University of Singapore, for employing me and allowing me to teach the CS3233-'Competitive Programming' module from which this book was born.

A de Bruijn torus is the two dimensional generalization of a de Bruijn sequence. While methods exist to generate these tori, only a few methods of construction are known. We present a novel method to generate de Bruijn tori with rectangular windows by combining two variants of de Bruijn sequences.

Mauricio Dávila1, Marisa Panizzi1, Darío Rodríguez2, Ramón García-Martínez2 1. Programa de Maestría en Ingeniería de Sistemas de Información. UTN FRBA, Argentina 2. Grupo de Ingeniería de Espacios Virtuales de Trabajo y Grupo de Investigación en Sistemas de Información. Departamento de Desarrollo Productivo Tecnológico. Universidad Nacional de Lanús [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Programming Contests are a special branch in the general area of training and education programming support and cover an important role in the area of computer science. Rather than the direct provision of concepts and exercises related to programming, the main concern is on the algorithms and data structures managed while composing the solution to a problem, and the quality of the solution program itself. Training via web for programming contests is mainly comprised of the activity of producing solutions to problems offered by the online system (online training platforms), whereas a solution is a program, submitted by the student, and it has to be evaluated, in order to assess the programming performance, and give suggestions about the quality of the solution, so to make the experience an informative (learning) one. To the best of our knowledge, supporting a personalized approach and possibly recommendations given by the system, is a challenge. In this paper we tackle the problem of supporting students in their online training toward the participation in a programming contest, aiming at defining a framework that can allow recommendations, under the form of suggestions, to the learner, about the next programming problem to undertake, and that can foster motivation in students by means of a lightweight, badge-based, gamified approach.

In this paper a novel design of an e-learning platform is proposed, aimed at programming education for groups of students. The platform is conceived as opensource software and its main technological design goal is to reduce its requirements on server-side resources. On the educational level it makes use of a number of gamification concepts, which are expected to increase students’ engagement in learning by not only awarding individual work but also stimulating students, on different occasions, for both immediate rivalry and team work.

Online judges are systems designed for the reliable evaluation of algorithm source code submitted by users, which is next compiled and tested in a homogeneous environment. Online judges are becoming popular in various applications. Thus, we would like to review the state of the art for these systems. We classify them according to their principal objectives into systems supporting organization of competitive programming contests, enhancing education and recruitment processes, facilitating the solving of data mining challenges, online compilers and development platforms integrated as components of other custom systems. Moreover, we introduce a formal definition of an online judge system and summarize the common evaluation methodology supported by such systems. Finally, we briefly discuss an Optil.io platform as an example of an online judge system, which has been proposed for the solving of complex optimization problems. We also analyze the competition results conducted using this pla...

The advances in technology in the last five years<br> allowed an improvement in the educational area, as the increasing in<br> the development of educational software. One of the techniques that<br> emerged in this lapse is called Gamification, which is the utilization of<br> video game mechanics outside its bounds. Recent studies involving<br> this technique provided positive results in the application of these<br> concepts in many areas as marketing, health and education. In the last<br> area there are studies that covers from elementary to higher education,<br> with many variations to adequate to the educators methodologies.<br> Among higher education, focusing on IT courses, data structures are<br> an important subject taught in many of these courses, as they are<br> base for many systems. Based on the exposed this paper exposes<br> the development of an interactive web learning environment, called<br>...

Genetic algorithms are random search algorithms based on biological evolution theory. In this study, the utilization of genetic algorithms in solving optimization problems from informatics Olympiads is investigated. It is hypothesized that genetic algorithms will be able to propose solutions to the optimization problem within a predetermined percent margin of the actual solution. A genetic algorithm is implemented in the C# programming language to test this hypothesis. Three tests are conducted, and their data is examined with various parameters taken into consideration. Consequently, the implemented genetic algorithm has been demonstrated to successfully solve the varying number of inputs (500, 1000, 2000) within an acceptable range. It is also concluded that several improvements and optimizations must be made to utilize this algorithm in a competitive landscape as time and memory constraints are exceeded. Furthermore, the tests concede that the number of inputs and the number of generations required to converge on an optimal solution is directly correlated. Therefore, this outcome should be taken into consideration when designing and tuning genetic algorithms with various parameters if the problem is aimed to be solved within the time and memory constraints of the competitive landscape.

We present a model for designing and implementing computer programming courses based on two approaches: competitive programming and gamification. From the former, it considers the ACMICPC standard for the exercises, as well as an automatic code validator. From the later, it considers the MDA model using several elements like points, rankings, levels and badges. For its validation, we conducted an experiment whose results showed that students’ perception about the combined strategy was positive and that their academic performance was improved.

Genetic algorithms are random search algorithms based on biological evolution theory. In this study, the utilization of genetic algorithms in solving optimization problems from informatics Olympiads is investigated. It is hypothesized that genetic algorithms will be able to propose solutions to the optimization problem within a predetermined percent margin of the actual solution. A genetic algorithm is implemented in the C# programming language to test this hypothesis. Three tests are conducted, and their data is examined with various parameters taken into consideration. Consequently, the implemented genetic algorithm has been demonstrated to successfully solve the varying number of inputs (500, 1000, 2000) within an acceptable range. It is also concluded that several improvements and optimizations must be made to utilize this algorithm in a competitive landscape as time and memory constraints are exceeded. Furthermore, the tests concede that the number of inputs and the number of generations required to converge on an optimal solution is directly correlated. Therefore, this outcome should be taken into consideration when designing and tuning genetic algorithms with various parameters if the problem is aimed to be solved within the time and memory constraints of the competitive landscape.

Genetic algorithms are random search algorithms based on biological evolution theory. In this study, the utilization of genetic algorithms in solving optimization problems from informatics Olympiads is investigated. It is hypothesized that genetic algorithms will be able to propose solutions to the optimization problem within a predetermined percent margin of the actual solution. A genetic algorithm is implemented in the C# programming language to test this hypothesis. Three tests are conducted, and their data is examined with various parameters taken into consideration. Consequently, the implemented genetic algorithm has been demonstrated to successfully solve the varying number of inputs (500, 1000, 2000) within an acceptable range. It is also concluded that several improvements and optimizations must be made to utilize this algorithm in a competitive landscape as time and memory constraints are exceeded. Furthermore, the tests concede that the number of inputs and the number of generations required to converge on an optimal solution is directly correlated. Therefore, this outcome should be taken into consideration when designing and tuning genetic algorithms with various parameters if the problem is aimed to be solved within the time and memory constraints of the competitive landscape.

The paper introduces Gamified Education Interoperability Language (GEdIL), designed as a means to represent the set of gamification concepts and rules applied to courses and exercises separately from their actual educational content. This way, GEdIL allows not only for an easy yet effective specification of gamification schemes for educational purposes, but also sharing them among instructors and reusing in various courses. GEdIL is published as an open format, independent from any commercial vendor, and supported with dedicated open-source software.

Existing gamification services have features that preclude their use by e-learning tools. Odin is a gamification service that mimics the API of state-of-the-art services without these limitations. This paper describes Odin, its role in an e-learning system architecture requiring gamification, and details its implementation. The validation of Odin involved the creation of a small e-learning game, integrated in a Learning Management System (LMS) using the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification.

Genetic algorithms are random search algorithms based on biological evolution theory. In this study, the utilization of genetic algorithms in solving optimization problems from informatics olympiads is investigated. It is hypothesized that genetic algorithms will be able to propose solutions to the optimization problem within a predetermined percent margin of the actual solution. A genetic algorithm is implemented in the C# programming language to test this hypothesis. Three tests are conducted and their data is examined with various parameters taken into consideration. Consequently, the implemented genetic algorithm has been demonstrated to successfully solve the varying number of inputs (500, 1000, 2000) within an acceptable range. It is also concluded that several improvements and optimizations have to be made to utilize this algorithm in a competitive landscape as time and memory constraints are exceeded. Furthermore, the tests concede that the number of inputs and the amount of generations required to converge on an optimal solution are directly correlated. Therefore this outcome should be taken into consideration when designing and tuning genetic algorithms with various parameters, if the problem is aimed to be solved within time and memory constraints of the competitive landscape.

There has been a focus in the ICT industry on the education of programming during the last decade, given that a lot of students who have taken programming courses at the third level, could not meet the industry requirements in related fields, due to lack of engagement or motivation. Java programming language, in an online setting, requires the provision of special gamification components, in order to lead to a better quality of teaching and learning. The aim of the project was to gamify, test and evaluate a specific course on Introduction to Java within GeNIE, a portal for gamification of higher education.

There has been a focus in the ICT industry on the education of programming during the last decade, given that a lot of students who have taken programming courses at the third level, could not meet the industry requirements in related fields, due to lack of engagement or motivation. Java programming language, in an online setting, requires the provision of special gamification components, in order to lead to a better quality of teaching and learning. The aim of the project was to gamify, test and evaluate a specific course on Introduction to Java within GeNIE, a portal for gamification of higher education.

This article presents the retrospective of organizing the Republican Olympiad in Informatics from the first editions. It describes the current model of organizing the competition: steps, target groups, methodologies of development, evaluation, and the preparation of participants for the different stages of the competition.

Resumen. Los correctores de programas (también llamados jueces) son actualmente herramientas conocidas, usadas ampliamente en el mundo de la enseñanza de la programación. Su modus operandi es sencillo: para un problema planteado, reciben la solución propuesta por un estudiante y comprueban si su funcionamiento es el esperado. En la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, hemos instalado el corrector Mooshak, con el propósito de servir a distintas asignaturas de programación de las facultades de Informática, Matemáticas y Estadística. Este pequeño documento introduce en el desarrollo de programas orientado a las pruebas y explica el manejo de este juez desde el punto de vista del estudiante. Palabras clave: programación, pruebas de caja negra, corrección automática de programas, concursos de programación.

Abstract. Those who enjoy programming enjoy programming competitions, either as contestants or as coaches. Often coaches are teachers, who, aiming at better results in the future, would like to have more and more students participating, from earlier stages. Learning all the basic algorithms takes some time, of course; on the other hand, competition environments can be introduced right from the beginning as a pedagogical tool. If handled correctly, this can be very effective in helping to reach the goals of the course and, as a ...

Programming contests has been phenomenal for last few years. Specially students of computer science are highly attracted to it. In the past, contests were not much widespread but now the area has expanded and a number of contests are available worldwide. The purpose of our paper is to have a revised idea of the formats of programming contests. Since numerous contests are now available, we intended to categorize them and discuss about the systems and formats. We specially focused on very popular ones such as International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), Google Code Jam and Facebook Hacker Cup. They have interesting historical background and excellent reputation around the world. Overall, this paper includes thorough discussion about some popular contests and their formats along with some popular online contest websites. This study might be helpful to those who are interested in competitive programming.

C++ program that generates the solution for an N-disked hanoi tower. The solution is printed as instructions on a text file, this is done to get through the limitations of console. It's an optimized process that takes advantage of a binary counter, stacks and functions with a O=log2(N) execution time.

The methodology for learning computer
programming called competitive programming has it's origin in programming competitions, provides
several advantages in the classes of the first
programming courses in university education, by
providing instant feedback to students. How to
develop programming courses under this
methodology and the benefits to students and
businesses is presented.
This article starts with survey taken to 20
programming teaches in 7 private universities and
one public. It shows the status of teaching
programming in the city of La Paz Plurinational
State of Bolivia, showing the feasibility of
implementing this methodology. The results show
that the feedback on programming assignments is
directly related to student approval. This situation
makes it very desirable to apply competitive
programming as a pedagogical tool in teaching
programming.

Online judges are used by competitive programmers as well as students to practice and hone their skills in programming. Unfortunately, most online judges are not explicitly designed as a training platform. Because of this, beginners are often lost when finding a suitable problem and get stuck on hard problems due to the lack of an effective training structure to follow. This causes them to become less inclined to practice further. Recently, there has been a trend of non-gaming applications introducing elements found in video games in order to increase user engagement and retention. This practice is known as gamification. This research project designed and implemented an online judge that is better suited for practice by utilizing gamification to create a structured training program to better guide and motivate its users to practice. Results show that the users of this system were substantially more active in practicing than those who did not use the system. However, the results were unable to show an improvement in learning in comparison to their current systems.

Competitions in programming for secondary and high school students in Bulgaria have long traditions. The National Olympiad in Informatics started in 1985. Even before 1985, competitions on national and regional level were popular. Bulgaria is founder and the first host of the International Olympiad in Informatics in 1989. The paper presents the current situation and challenges in the area of Informatics competitions in Bulgaria. The structure of the competition system, including the Bulgarian National Olympiad in Informatics is outlined.

Those who enjoy programming enjoy programming competitions, either as contestants or as coaches. Often coaches are teachers, who, aiming at better results in the future, would like to have more and more students participating, from earlier stages. Learning all the basic algorithms takes some time, of course; on the other hand, competition environments can be introduced right from the beginning as a pedagogical tool. If handled correctly, this can be very effective in helping to reach the goals of the course and, as a side-effect, in bringing larger crowds of students into the programming competition arena.

Programski jezik Logo izvrstan je alat za učenje programiranja,
pogotovo kod djece osnovnoškolske pa čak i predškolske dobi. Većina zadataka
predviđena za tu dob su vizualnog tipa. Najčešće je zadatak nacrtati kakav
geometrijski lik ili kompoziciju koja prikazuje neku temu (kuća, cesta,
lampa, i sl.). Iz perspektive mentora koji podučava te provjerava učenička
rješenja često je prisutna "odokativna" metoda provjere koja često može biti
nepouzdana. Idealna metoda bi svakako bila algoritamski utvrditi ispravnost
takvog uratka te istovremeno dobiti informaciju o tome gdje je pogreška i u
kojoj mjeri je uradak ispravan uz unaprijed poznata odstupanja. Usporedba
dviju slika na trivijalan način (raster usporedba) najčešće nije pogodna
zbog dozvoljenih odstupanja (tolerancija prema zadanoj normi), također -
piksel nije idealna jedinica za kvalitativno uspoređivanje slika po sadržaju
koje su uglavnom geometrijske prirode. Kako postoji više pristupa koji vode
ka zadanom rješenju (slici), potrebni su određeni postupci normalizacije i
transformacije vektorskog zapisa dviju slika ne bi li se mogle kvalitativno
usporediti. Otkrivamo koji su to važni postupci normalizacije i
transformacije te pod kojim uvjetima. Također navodimo koje kriterije valja
primijeniti kod verifikacije i vrednovanja ovisno o sadržaju i naravi
zadatka. U nastavku raspravljamo kada je ispravno primijeniti raster
usporedbu i kako valja postupati u slučaju flood fill-a. Fokus seminara su
korišteni algoritmi, njihova analiza i optimizacija. Kao dodatak, ukratko
predstavljamo komponente takvog softverskog rješenja u praksi i korištene
tehnologije te sažeti pregled arhitekture projekta.

Autori: Konrad i Kristijan Burnik

the participants the UGC Chairman said "the students are the future of the country. The contest is a mind war where the fittest (both physically and mentally) will win." Addressing all the students he congratulated the NSU foundation and NSU family for developing the campus aswell. Also he acknowledged the Private University New Act 2010, passed in the parliament to ensure good quality of education and physical infrastructure. He also stated about the 5-year project on loan taken from WB; to support the development of higher education enhancement providing internet facility in every university in Bangladesh.

Abstract Programming contestscanprovide ahigh-profile method for attracting interest in computer science. We describe our philosophy as it pertains to the purpose and merits of programming contests as well as their implementation. We believe that we have successfully combined the theoretical and practical aspectsof computer science in an enjoyable contest in which many people can participate. The contests we describe have distinct advantages over contests such as the ACM scholastic programming contest.

Those who enjoy programming enjoy programming competitions, either as contestants or as coaches. Often coaches are teachers, who, aiming at better results in the future, would like to have more and more students participating, from earlier stages. Learning all the basic algorithms takes some time, of course; on the other hand, competition environments can be introduced right from the beginning as a pedagogical tool. If handled correctly, this can be very effective in helping to reach the goals of the course and, as a side-effect, in bringing larger crowds of students into the programming competition arena.