Contest Rules
These rules and procedures may be modified and/or extended right up to the time of the competition.
Our competition rules are based on the rules used for the regional and international programming competitions sponsored by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), though there are differences because the student level and experience are not the same.
- Every high school (public or private) in Nova Scotia is eligible to send a team.
- Normally two teams per participating high school.
- There are generally two students per team though a team of one is also allowed.
- There is only one computer workstation per team (whether it's one student or two), and only one login session per team is permitted as well.
- Students may use hard-copy (paper or book) reference material but not soft-copy (electronic) reference material. So no disks or CDs are permitted, for example.
- No calculators, audio devices or video devices are permitted. The Windows calculator accessory may be used if a calculator is required for any reason.
- No communication is permitted between teams or between teams and teachers/coaches, once the competition has started. Also, students are not permitted access to outside resources via a web browser or e-mail during the competition.
- Solutions are submitted electronically, and to be accepted a submitted program must produce the right output values in the correct format, for each of the sample input data files. Program code itself is not read and not evaluated in any way. Input test data files used by the judges may (and generally will) include one or more data files that the teams have not seen.
- A solution which is not accepted as correct will be rejected. A time penalty of 10 minutes is assessed for each rejected submission.
- The winner is determined by most problems solved, with ties broken by total time taken.