1. ACM programming contest Introduction

2. ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (a.k.a. ACM ICPC, ACM competition, ICPC) is the largest university-level programming contest in the world. ACM - Association of Computing Machinery ◦ Largest association for computer science ◦ Organize research conference ◦ Publish journal, etc Background

3. Contest rule Each team: 3 students One computer per team 4- 6 hours 8 - 13 problems (like the sudoku question) ◦ Input and output requirement ◦ Time limit Judge by some test cases (unknown to us) ◦ Pass all test cases = solve the question ◦ If you fail, you can resubmit Score ≈ "# of solved question" and "time used" Winner = most question solved, if draw, the one uses least time

4. Tentative schedule Topics Feb - April Basic topics: recursion, greedy, dynamic programming, graphs, breadth first search, depth first search MayTeam formation test for local contest June / JulyACM Hong Kong Local Contest July - August Intermediate topics: matching, coordinate geometry, math AugustTeam formation test for regional contest Sep - OctAdvanced topics: Contest like problems Oct / NovACM Asia Regional Contest MarchACM World Final Contest (by invitation)

5. Training tools Practice makes perfect - Online problem archive http://poj.org/ Ability ≈ number of problems you have solved Our first question: POJ 2719 Faulty Odometer Notice: input is between 1 to 999,999,999; 0 means the end Time limit: 1 second Every digit has only 9 possibilities; It is a base-9 number [0-3] -> [0-3] && [5-9] -> [4-8] See your ranking at http://poj.org/searchuser?key=HKU&field=school&B1=GO