To close out the spring semester, we will have a special contest with prizes! The contest is open to all students at Princeton, and will have prizes for the top contestants! There is a general prize pool open to everyone, as well as a separate prize pool for the best freshmen/sophomores, so everyone has a chance of winning!
To sign up, please fill out the registration form as soon as possible, and no later than 24 hours before the competition.
The contest starts Friday April 24 at 5:00pm and lasts two hours, so it finishes at 7:00pm, and it will take place in Friend Center 006. Try to show up before 5pm so you can have time to set up.
If you have never participated in one of our competitive programming sessions, please check our intro guide to get set up before the contest.
Everyone competes on the same set of problems. There are two separate prize pools:
General pool – open to all contestants, awarded to the top overall finishers.
Freshmen/Sophomores pool – awarded to the top finishers who are freshmen or sophomores.
A contestant can only win from one pool. If a freshman/sophomore places high enough to win a general prize, their general prize slot goes to the next eligible contestant.
Note that most problems will have appeared before in other competitions from around the world, we won’t have original problems in our contests unless otherwise mentioned. You shouldn’t try to search for the original problem, since this would be cheating.
The use of any AI tools is strictly prohibited during the contest. This includes, but is not limited to, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Claude, Gemini, and any other AI-powered code generation or assistance tools. Contestants found to be using AI tools will be disqualified and will not be eligible for prizes.
Prizes are TBA. There will be 3 prizes per pool, awarded in the following order:
(At most one graduate student can win a General prize)
Please read these carefully.
The contest will take exactly 2 hours. No extensions will be granted in case of lateness (so try to be on time).
The contest is individual, so you will participate on your own. You are not allowed to communicate with anyone during the contest.
You are allowed to use any code you have stored locally, which includes solutions you wrote to previous problems, implementations of data structures or algorithms, or any code templates. However, you are not allowed to search the internet for anything.
You are not allowed to use ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Claude, Gemini, or any other AI-powered tool (running locally or on the internet) to generate any type of code. Contestants found using AI tools will be disqualified and will not be eligible for prizes.
There will be problems of ranging difficulties, which are expected to be sorted by difficulty (so problem A should be no harder than problem B, and so on). These are not original problems, they are taken from other public contests available online, so you are not allowed to try to find any information about the original contest.
The standings will be determined as follows: first number of problems solved (more is better), tie breaking by the sum of the number of minutes taken to solve each problem plus 10 extra minutes per incorrect submission to an accepted problem (less is better), which is the default CodeForces ranking method.
Please follow these carefully (preferably at least one day before the contest date).
To participate in the contest you need a Codeforces account. If you don’t have one, click on the link and then click on Register in the top right corner and fill out the required details.
You will also need to be in the Princeton Competitive Programming group on Codeforces. To join this group, go to the following link and click on the join button on the right.
The contest will be on the Princeton Competitive Programming Group and it will show up there around an hour before the competition starts. Click on the register button once the contest is up.
Looking at the problems and submitting solutions will work exactly like the usual weekly problem-solving sessions. See our intro guide if you are not familiar with this process.
If you have any questions ask Pedro Paredes (pparedes_at_cs.princeton.edu) for help.
ACM Student Chapter of Princeton, Inc