Disclaimer: I am not an official ICPC stuff. I write this post just to summarize the information about the North American Championship next year and earn some contribution (sssshhhhhh...!).
Last evening, the information about the North American Championship (NAC for short) is released by the ICPC official.
Finally the schools in North America can have an exciting superregional! Although we have NAIPCs before, this one sounds more official!
Summary of the rules
Those are some key takeaways I summarized from the official document:
- This is an onsite competition at Georgia Institute of Technology on February 19-23, 2020, in Atlanta, Georgia.
- A certain number of teams from each regional (different for each regional, see Below) can advanced to NAC, and at most one team from a university can advance to NAC.
- 55 teams will compete in NAC for a gold medal (the champion), two silver medals (2nd and 3rd), and three bronze medals (4th, 5th, and 6th).
- The top 16 teams from NAC will advance to the World Finals 2020 in Moscow, Russia.
- The top team will be the North America Champion. The top team from each of the 4 subregion (West, MidWest, East, South) will be acknowledged as subregion champion.
- It looks like they will try to make the contest similar to World Finals (including the coding environment, the rules, 25-page reference material, etc). See the website below for more details.
More info is available on http://nac.icpc.global/
Some opinions
First, NAC will improve the North American ICPC team selection process, which has been heavily discussed in this post. The contest offers a good field to see who deserves to be in the World Finals.
I am pretty sure this will make ICPC a more exciting experience for more contestants. Before we have NAC, the only contest each team can have is the regoinal, which, in my region, is hosted in a room of 12 teams (although there are totally 200+ teams in the regional). Then