Skip to main content

ACM@USC

Association for Computing Machinery at the University of South Carolina

2020 Fall Codeathon

— Discord and Hackerank

Code-A-Thon: 9 October 2020 - 10 October 2020

This year's code-a-thon will be held on our Discord (Join here: http://discord.gg/uRRAmYD), as well as the normal Hackerank contests. We will be using the Discord voice channels to have little breakouts, where you can talk just as we would when everyone is down at Swearingen.

How It Works

When the contest starts at 7 pm on October 9th, you will have a 24 hour time window to submit your answers to algorithm based questions. Think of it as an exam that opens at 7 pm October 9th, but is not due until 7 pm the next day.

Different questions are worth different amounts of points, depending on their difficulty. For each question, there are test cases that test your solution against a variety of inputs. The percentage of test cases that you get correct determines how many points you get for that problem. (i.e. if a problem is worth 20 points, and your program works on half the test cases, you would get 10 points).

Each problem statement will have a section called "Constraints". This means the problem writer has guaranteed that the test case input will only be in the format/ number range specified. (i.e. There is no point in validating the constraints in your program. If you actually tried to account for every way the input could be messed up, you would spend the entire contest on that instead of the algorithm part :) )

When reading input for the problem, just read in the input as if someone was typing in the console of your IDE (likely the same way you have read input for most of your programs, aka standard input).

Prizes

This year due to COVID we are only able to award prizes to first placeholders ($50 gift card). Those that place top 3 in each division will still be posted on our website (full leaderboard will also be available). You are only eligible for prizes if you are competing in the correct division (or a higher one, limit of 1 prize per person). i.e. If you are in CSCE350 and try competing in 146, you will not be eligible for prizes in the 146 division. There are no prizes for the alumni division, sorry!

Ethics

It has always been open internet, and mainly an exercise of problem solving skills, but like other years we discourage sharing answers and solutions, instead we emphasize idea sharing and a socially positive environment for everyone. Due to this years strange conditions, we only ask for any bugs to be posted in the #codeathon-bug channel on discord, and it will be taken care of when a problem writer is available.

Extra Credit

Due to the inability to have a sign in sheet, there will also be a channel where you can post, your USC email, Hackerank username, class and class section. This way it is very easy to compile everyone and send solutions to professors upon request.

The division you compete in is based on which of the following courses you are currently in (or last completed if not in any of the following). For example, if you are currently in 145, or have taken it, but are not in 146, and have not taken 146 yet, 145 is the division you may compete within for prizes. If you have yet to take 145 or are not a CSCE major, feel free to jump in for 145.

Join here:

Last Notes

Remember to have fun, take healthy breaks, and get the most out of our unfortunate situation over Discord and jump into the breakout rooms.

Tiebreaks

Tiebreaks will be decided as the Hackerank default, as in the first to reach the score will be given precedence.

Previous Semester

Here are the contests for last semester

Here are the solutions for the Spring 2020 Problems: