Getting Contestants Ready
Here are few pointers to help contestants get ready for the contest:
- The best thing you can do to get ready for the contest is practice solving problems as much as possible. An excellent site for past acm/icpc problems is this site. (note: The site doesn't seem to be updated!)
- The Competitive Learning Institute (part of ICPC) has an online judge for past ICPC world final and regional problems
- Regional winners are usually active on Top Coder!
- University of Valladolid has a contest site with an enormous problems archive. You can even send your answers to the online Judge. Follow this link.
- Here's also a link to the problem-sets used in previous Arab Collegiate Programming Contests: 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, and 1998.
- We also published the I/O for some of the previous ACPC years: 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005. We're still hopefull that 2002--2004 will be published in the near future.
- A good text book is Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual. The book has its own online judging system.
- Here's an interesting article on the best teams strategy. The article is titled: Teamwork in Programming Contests: 3*1=4.
- Here's another article about common programming errors. The article is titled: Common Mistakes in Online and Real-time Contests.
- Don't forget you can bring any printed material to the contest: Books, notes, listings, whatever you like as long as it is not in an electronic format.
Got a pointer you wish to share with the rest? Send an email to info@acm-acpc.org