Hello everyone,
I will talk about my recent ICPC experiences.
SEERC 2024
The South-eastern Europe Regional Contest 2024 was organized on November 16 and 17, 2024. Teams from Serbia, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Moldova, and other countries participated.
Let me start with the positives:
The problems were nice. They had variety. It was a pleasure solving them.
There were no bugs in checkers or model solutions.
Now, onto the issues. For the first time since 2019, SEERC was organized as an onsite competition. It was split into two sites. One of them was in Bucharest, Romania. The other one was in Lviv, Ukraine. There must have been a good reason not to have exactly one site, or more sites. My team would have benefited from having one in Belgrade, Serbia, as our transportation was disastrous. Our university barely managed to book plane tickets and hotels. Anyway, it is better to participate at one site with all the other teams. I am always up for it if the organization can compensate for the travel fees. (Spoiler: no)
Starting with the practice session, it was a huge mess. My team's IDE was not available. We had to use Visual Studio Code (which also did not work properly), or a text editor in Linux with compiling directly in the terminal. Note that one of the key functions, the printer, did not work. We did not know if we would be able to print our codes for debugging purposes during the contest. The day of the competition was not much better. First, we were told not to touch anything before the competition started. Oddly enough, there was no announcement regarding it. We didn't know it had started until we saw other teams write code. Then, with the same previous issues from the practice session, our keyboard was broken. Literal keys were missing. When we asked for another one, we got one where another key was broken. Upon changing it for the second time, it began working correctly. Running our first code was also troublesome due to our IDEs not working. In total, this has cost us about 30 minutes of the competition. We were penalized for it. Not to mention, the food we were offered was cold.
I should also add that the competition was postponed for about an hour. We had to wake up early only to realize the contest was not ready. We were then told to wait in Building B, only to be told to come back to Building A, and so on back and forth. After a while (1 hour) of waiting aimlessly, we were seated. The reason for delays was claims of a planted bomb. Weird. Such things did not happen during the online round last year. None of the things I mentioned so far did!
EuC 2025
European Championship is a super regional. The top 13 teams from each of the following regionals participate: CERC, NWERC, SEERC, SWERC. My team, Sombrero, took the 6th place and scored a bronze medal. Since we were the second team in our University, we had additional constraints. Last year, in EuC 2024, the second team must further place in the top 10. In fact, according to the SEERC 2023 standings, there were two teams from the University [POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest]. They qualified for the EuC. At the time of SEERC 2024 and briefly after, these were the official rules. So, we qualified? Of course not!
This year, the rule was changed for a reason unknown to me. Now, only one team per University qualifies. I beg the organizers and directors to explain this decision. Why do you change this rule after the regional standings are out? Is it to sabotage Serbia's success, since it already has 4 teams in the top 6 each scoring a medal? I request clarification as to why this rule wasn't set before the first ICPC regionals round and before the results were out. That way, bias could have been prevented.
For the last two years, we had issues. Clearly this blog shows similar problems that existed in the past. This year had an even worse start.
Good luck with organizing the European Championship. I hope we can have a normal contest with well-defined rules in the future. Not rules that are invented on the go and as the organizers please.
That's unfair.
It’s funny that you think judges are the ones setting up the rules. I had more chances to speak my mind about SEERC still not allowing team reference documents in 2024 as a coach than if I were a judge. Nobody consults the judges about anything.
Thank you for clarification. I will remove the names as it is quite unfair.
Well, while I totally agree with you on the importance of announcing rules in advance, let me note a couple of issues with what you are telling in EUC part:
Thank you for the comment. Had we known the rules before SEERC, we would not have participated. It is scary how unorganized everything is and that there is nothing we can do. The local organizers of SEERC did not even know about the rule. They could not tell us anything when we asked them.
With some of the questions answered, I remain even more confused about the rules.
Although it won't change anything for you, I want to give you some background information: this rule change was proposed at the last EUC and accepted by an unanonymous vote of the attending coaches. The main reason here was that this rule is much clearer, easier to understand, and also "fairer" (the last point is subjective). So, the problem in this case was not how or when this was decided, but how it was announced. As Pavel already mentioned at NWERC this was announced, and I would have expected that all regional contest directors were informed of this...
The simplest and fairest version of the rule is "Top 13 teams advance to EUC".
That rule is theoretically broken. Suppose the first 13 teams all come from the same university for each regional (yes very very unlikely) then there would be fewer teams that could advance to the wf than wf finals slots.
Anyway, as far as I know, the main reason for the current rule is to give more universities the chance to participate in the EUC (and by accident this also makes it easier to finance for the universities since they can only send one team max).
That's funny, I was not expecting to see NWERC as an example of a decent organization. To start with, they blindly accept anyone and don't even check if contestants are eligible.
I would say NWERC is pretty well organized. And comparing my experience with what I read here from many other competitions (that I did not attend myself) I would say it's one of the best organized:
Yes, they do accept any teams but it's the job of the coach to check this in the first place. And why should that be a problem at all, if you do advance you get checked and if you were not eligible your team will be punished (and I would expect that your university also gets punished like getting banned for 2 years but that's just a guess).
It is a problem since it ruins the experience for the other teams (from the same university and others) who decided which/how many problems to tackle looking at a scoreboard that had misleading information of how many problems you needed to qualify. This is especially relevant for universities that performed "better" in the previous competitions, since those were allowed 2 teams this year. This means that the strategy of one of the teams depended on the performance of the other, since only one would advance to EUC.
I understand that the coach is the main responsible, but this is also more complicated than you are making it seem. Several teams from the same institution may have different coaches, which makes it even less fair to delegate this responsibility to the coach (who might be a random student, so it seems harsh to punish the institution). I am not saying that the organizers should require passports and proof of registration. But maybe while manually accepting the (mandatory by their rules) registration on icpc.global they could try to read the red non-eligible warning that pops up.
I am pretty sure that this is checked to some extent. But besides that the problem you mention doesn't actually exists. No one here actively tries to break the rules... on one hand because there is no good reason to do this and on the other hand it wouldn't get you anywhere anyway.
And I have to say that checking passports is totally inappropriate.
And besides that, you are accusing the orga of not checking this. Can you prove those accusations? As in do you know of any case where this mattered/happened in the past few years?
It really isn't. Because of a mistake in icpc.global regarding training camps, I appear as not eligible (even though I am), but of course they just accepted my participation without even asking me why. Other cases are more serious, but they wouldn't know (read below).
On EUC last year, I had to show it to enter the contest floor, so it does not seem so scandalous. But still, I am not expecting them to do that, just to do a little effort of using the information they already have in a website that checks it automatically.
I just started competing on this region this year, so I don't know about past years. This year, at least one university as been removed from the upcoming EUC because 2 of the contestants were not eligible. I don't blame the contestants, they probably did not even know since nobody fills their profiles on icpc.global anymore since the organizers do not care.
I know and I think that was really weird (and the way this was done was even weirder...)
which team was that and is this information public anywhere?
They are definitely to blame. You are responsible for checking this or at least your coach?!
Not yet, I think it will only become clear when they update the EUC website with the invited teams.
About travel fees: unfortunately the travel situation will change from university to university since ICPC never does anything in regards to that other than provide some document that supports your visa. I've heard of teams being stuck in the limbo of "will the university pay travel fees or not?" and then the university telling them that they'd not pay it 3 days before the competition, resulting in 4x more travel expenses straight out of the contestants' pockets.
Food can always be worse, in Egypt they provided the usual food to our contestant that filled in the forms saying that he can't eat gluten. It was also cold. Maybe for future contests check with them if you can bring in some snacks.
The rest really sucks, hopefully some people that are involved with it care and see this post so that it becomes more well organized in the future. The "no announcement for contest start", broken keyboard shit and IDE shit are absolutely wild...
The problem with travel fees is the money (who would have guessed it). To be more serious, the travel fees vary so widely that it is really impractical to cover for this ):
For me, this was also a big reason against the introduction of the EUC since it increases the money that you (or hopefully your university) need to spend to attend the WF (and for the EUC you need to pay for travel fees and accommodation...). This topic also came up at the last EUC, and the organization simply told us that we should find local sponsors to cover these costs... which is much easier said than done. So this problem is known but also very much ignored ^^'
Yep, ICPC is notoriously unclear/shady at the qualification rules. I think having the one per uni rule at EUC level is bad (I understand it, but qualification to WF shouldn't be the only purpose of the EUC). I don't agree that organisers should necessarily provide the travel/accommodation costs, as it's already hard to organise the contest, but I do wonder where the sponsor budget went (I know it didn't go to the judges).
To add two of my "favorite" anecdotes from this year's SEERC that perfectly explain how the contest was organized (also Bucharest site):
However, I want to thank the judges as the problemset was the only thing that was really enjoyable.
isn't this the norm?
I'm pretty sure we got three copies of tasks at both EUC and WF last year (well, this year I guess). Obviously, this is not that big of a deal — I just found it really funny that they went through the trouble of stapling the tasks, just for every team to rip it first thing into the contest
funny, my region always gives the problemset in that manner
I think it is easy to make an educated guess on why SEERC has exactly two contest sites