The coding phase has been finished. Please wait for the final testing and results.
Good day everybody.
Everything written below is not a April Fool's joke. Though it is also a funny occasion :)
We are glad to announce a new experimental contest on Codeforces, "Problem Parser Contest".
Have you ever made training sessions, using the previous contests' archives? Have you downloaded from the Internet contest archives to test for your solutions locally? If the answer is 'yes', then you couldn't help noticing that each organizer insists upon inventing his own way (format) to distribute problems. Yes, it is true!
I've prepared and organized a huge number of trainings based on the previous contests. It is often rather a monotonous task; one often has to write some scripts that rename the input/output files of the problem into the standard form. In archives they are called very differently: they can be river.in.1, river.out.1, river.in.2, river.out.2, etc. In another problem they can be tests/1.dat, tests/1.ans, tests/2.dat, tests/2.ans etc.
At some point I got fed up with it and wrote a script that told the patterns of paths to the test files, using some heuristics and the regularity I'd noticed. The script worked well, but it wasn't perfect.