Professional skills assessment in programming competitions
ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
Problems from the 12th annual ACM programming contest
ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
The internet programming contest: a report and philosophy
SIGCSE '93 Proceedings of the twenty-fourth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Competing in the ACM scholastic programming contest (abstract)
CSC '93 Proceedings of the 1993 ACM conference on Computer science
The computer science fair: an alternative to the computer programming contest
SIGCSE '96 Proceedings of the twenty-seventh SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Preparing a team for the ACM scholastic programming contest (panel session)
CSC '91 Proceedings of the 19th annual conference on Computer Science
Programming contest strategies
Crossroads - Special issue on computer games
Engaging students with theory through ACM collegiate programming contest
Communications of the ACM
My favorite programming contest problems
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
Mooshak: a Web-based multi-site programming contest system
Software—Practice & Experience
Adding objects to the traditional ACM programming contest
Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Organized Cyber Defense Competitions
ICALT '04 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies
A distributed system for learning programming on-line
Computers & Education
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Each year the ACM hosts a truly international programming contest - the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Dating back to a contest held by Texas A&M University in 1970, this annual event, along with the associated regional contests, has grown to 5606 teams from 1733 universities in 84 countries (in the year 2006). Despite the maturity of the event, and the number of competitors, there has never been a systematic examination of contest strategy. Herein several strategies are proposed and examined to determine whether a team can gain an advantage by choosing a good strategy; and, if so, then what that strategy should be. We show that a team can gain an advantage by choosing a good strategy, but that there is no one best strategy. A team must choose between winning by number of solved problems and winning by points. Finding the optimal strategy to win by problems is shown to be NP-complete, while to win by points a team must solve problems in order from easiest to hardest.