CodeForces官方比赛规则介绍

The text contains only preliminary rules of Codeforces contests – something surely will change. In particular, I hope to help the community to find the illogic in the rules. However, I have already discussed the format with programming contests dinosaurs and made unrated alpha contests – it seems rules are OK.

I think than the format 5 tasks x 2 hour is quite good. For this reason, in the near future we will not change it, but of course, experiments are possible.

1. Before the competition all participants are divided into rooms, each room contains about 20 participants. For now random strategy works, but after a while it will be somehow correlated with the rating.

2. The start of contest looks quite like ICPC: all problems immediately available for viewing/solving, the statements are simple and understandable. Choose the problem and begin to solve it. I think the idea to order problems by difficulty is good. The aim of the participant is to earn as much scores as possible.

3. The cost of the problem can be determined by the following table. For example, if the problem B was solved after 10 minutes of contest, then it costs 1000 – 4 * 10 = 960 points. For each attempt there is penalty of 50 points. So, if the problem B was solved after 10 minutes from the beginning with the third attempt, the score for it is 1000 – 4 * 10 – 2 * 50 = 860 points. However, no matter how much attempts you did and when you solved the problem, the cost of the solution can not drop below 30% of points (see the column “Min. Score (30 %)