Hey'all!
This gonna be a long post, so let me put an important TLDR here first: we are going to host The 3rd Universal Cup Semifinals, which will take place on August 24, 2025 online, at 11:00 (UTC). This contest will be a part of our Finals Team Selection, which the detailed rules and announcements will be published later next week.
Now for some extra context, if you're interested.
Last week, we hosted the last online stage of The 3rd Universal Cup. After that, I posted a feedback form on our discord server. I received lots of thoughtful responses (P.S — it's still open, so feel free to fill it out if you haven't yet!).
I've read through all the feedback, and I'd like to share a few thoughts.
On the Number of Stages
Last year, we had 40 stages, which is a huge number, especially compared to the 28 from Season 2 and around 20 in regular Open Cup seasons. Unlike 2-3 hour CF rounds, these are 5-hour contests for teams of three. That’s a big commitment, especially for teams aiming for the top of the leaderboard or a Finals spot. Competing seriously in all 40 stages is very exhausting.
At the same time, choosing which contests to use is also a big challenge for us. In season 1 and season 2, we had several stages made with a mix of multiple "easy contests" (like Chinese Provincial/Invitational contests or easier regionals) and independent hard tasks. In practice, this didn’t work very well — they were pretty much the stages with the least participation, while preparing them still took a lot of effort.
Now, I'm more seriously considering how to adjust the number of stages. Starting from Season 4, I plan to reduce the total number of stages and introduce some unrated stages. Instead of hosting an independent "div.2 ucup" or "hard track", we will try to use some easier contests along with some innovative contests with non-traditional tasks as unrated extra stages. The goal for each season is to have around 20 ~ 25 rated "grand prix" stages, complemented by several unrated "extra stages" that are still valuable for training.
Having an Olympiad Track?
Short answer: probably not right now.
I actually discussed this idea with several team leaders during IOI 2024 in Egypt, and there’s clear interest. But making it happen is... complicated.
The biggest issue? We simply can not find a decent number of problem sets to use. Unlike ICPC-style contests, Olympiad rounds are often created and held by official bodies in many countries, and reaching out to them isn’t easy. Just based on my experiences in China, it was a complete nightmare to get in touch with the Chinese organizers, not to mention the shit stories that happened to me with CCF. Many amazing contests, like IOI, JOIs, POIs, and CEOIs, are already hosting public mirrors or publish the problem materials shortly after the official contest.
That said, I have been helping to host the IOI China Team Trainings over the past few years, and we exchanged some good tasks with other delegations and hosted some small inter-delegation trainings. If we can make any progress on having a larger training event with a decent number of new sources, we will consider to open the UCup Olympiad Track. But for now, it’s not feasible.
On our contest platform and the rules
Yeah, I know there were still two pending features which has been planed for months, while there are still some argues about some current features. Mainly:
- A team composition editor, so teams can specify who is competing in a particular stage.
- A built-in interface to request an early start window, instead of DMing me every stage.
I genuinely hope to have both implemented for next season — I promise I’m working on it.
This leads to a debate that has happened a lot of times — why can't we just have a week long window to start at any time instead of several fixed time windows. Ah, well, the short answer: we want to preserve the competitive integrity of the contest. Having a fixed set of official windows helps simulate the pressure of a real contest. Many of us know that feeling — doing fine in casual training, but stumbling during an actual onsite like IOI, WF, or even a school final exam. That’s why we ask teams to commit to a fixed time and treat it seriously. One other aspect is that near-synchronized participation allows for more meaningful scoreboard comparisons. Yes, the current system isn't perfect — teams starting later get more information — but it’s still better than having dozens of teams starting a few minutes after you.
We fully understand that this is difficult for many people and many teams choose to participate virtually after the competition, which is why we now have eight active time windows each week so that people around the world can find a time that suits them.
Regarding the extra early start window, this should feel familiar if you've participated in Open Cups with ext-login, which the teams are allowed to start before the official contest. Starting in Season 2, we allowed teams to request an early window — mostly to avoid conflicts with major events (e.g., IOI, WF, AWTF, or local regionals). In past seasons, teams could apply by messaging me; next season, I aim to integrate this into the platform.
Oh, and don't forget the Hacks — I never mentioned it in our official rules, but you've probably seen them many times before.
We've all seen cases where a problem has incorrect solutions that the author didn’t catch, and hacking is a good way to uncover those. Currently, if a submission fails on a hack test, it's marked as failed in the verdict but still counts as accepted on the scoreboard. That’s because post-contest hacks shouldn’t affect how teams performed during the original contest. But for virtual participants, this gets tricky. Should we also treat hacked solutions as OK on the scoreboard in virtual mode? If yes, what verdicts should we show while the virtual contest is still ongoing? I don’t have a perfect solution yet, and I'd really appreciate your opinions.
One last thing is about the programming languages — I believe I have added all the languages requested by the community, mainly Kotlin and Rust. For me. there aren't any immediate plans to add more, but I'm always open to suggestions!
The ratings
Let's talk about ratings. Our current formula? It was, uh... something I randomly came up two years ago. It worked well in season 2, but season 3 has became more and more competitive, we must consider this more carefully. Two major issues stand out:
- For top teams, ratings come down to how many wins/top-X finishes they collect. Performances in other stages are nearly irrelevant.
- If one strong team dominates a round, like the things happened in Ookayama and Aobayama, the rating impact on others becomes really marginal. Teams did absolutely nothing wrong just because USA1 solved 20 problems while everyone else solved less than 10.
I do plan to make some changes for the rating system in season 4, though I don't have a clear replacement yet. If you have ideas or suggestions, I'd love to hear them!
Website Updates
I know, I know... the website has been outdated for a long while. I owe you all an explanation.
While we have a committee, most of the day-to-day work—maintenance, scheduling, configuring tasks, etc. has been handled by me alone. The committee members have been a huge help (huge thanks to them!), but a lot of stuff still ends up on my plate.
That's why we migrated our main webpage — our previous site is just a temporary page built on QOJ, and it's hard to maintain it without me handling the updates. After the migration, Dup4 and cubercsl now help me to update the materials to the website. However, they're also busy with work, and to be honest, I often forget to update contest info after publishing a round. What's even worse is that I was in a particularly bad shape — I will explain what happened — in the last whole year. Therefore, for a long time our website was very out-of-date.
If you are a contestant, we strongly encourage you to join our Discord server if you haven't. We mainly post our contest announcement and platform updates on Discord, so you won't miss anything. Going forward, the committee will take a more active role in announcements and maintaining the website. But still — Discord will always be the first place to check for updates.
About me and The Universal Cup
In case you didn’t already know — yep, I’m still technically a (kinda) high school student :)
But how? Haven't you said you will go to college in 2024?
OK, this part will be shitty. Skip this if you don't want to hear a shitpost from a kid. Buckle up.
As I mentioned earlier and in the UCup Guangzhou Announcement, I noted that I've been in really, really bad shape over the past year. A lot of incredibly frustrating, unreasonable, and just straight-up awful stuff happened to me. I've been carrying all that from the Season 2 Semifinals up to now. It's been hard.
You'd probably wonder how something this serious could happen to a student. Well, I promised to write an English post about that one. But honestly, it’s incredibly hard to tell this story without understanding how the Chinese educational systems work — and more importantly, it’s painful for me to revisit it every time.
I would just say everything in short: I was admitted and planned to enroll PKU in 2024 by Chinese MOE policy on Olympiads, confirmed in 2022, but I cannot go to colleges due to a stupid mistake from CCF side. In order to shirk responsibility, they ultimately dumped all the problems on me and made me deal with this unpleasant matter for the past year. I know that I am not responsible for the whole thing, and the teachers and staff from PKU also believe that it can be resolved, so I've spent the past year trying to resolve it — fighting through layers of bureaucracy, filing appeals, seeking mediation (so during the last semifinals in Cancun, I was organizing everything while having endless calls with the relevant people. If you noticed I disappeared from almost all social activities — this was why). In the end, all of this, along with my memories of Peking University, my ICPC team, my plans for 2024 and 2025, and everything else I did, was destroyed by this endless procrastination. They were all destroyed by this endless spiral of delays.
I know all of this might sound confusing — it’s hard to explain it properly in just a few paragraphs. You may want to read my relevant passage here in short or a detailed wrap-up (didn't publish because it's long, and it contains a lot of private shit, so feel free to DM me if you want to see it).
Over the past year, there have been many stages that I hastily uploaded and set up after experiencing pain and resentment, or after undergoing psychological treatment. Even now, I am still doing endless appeals, although I believe this is impossible to be resolved in the current situation. (It's kind of a joke that the appealing letter I wrote to CAST during the Semifinals in Cancun has still not been replied to, after a whole year)
But, I'm still here. Regardless, I still hope to contribute to the community I love in my best possible shape. I'll keep my best.
I especially appreciate the helps I received during my bad time, especially chenjb and MiaoMiao_E for executing and planning, xiaowuc1, kostka, and lperovskaya for organizing, and Dup4, cubercsl for their technical help. The first time when ftiasch heard my stories, drawing on her extensive experience, she mentioned that the hardest part of is sticking with it for the long haul. It's not realistic for me, or for anyone, to handle everything from the tasks uploading, contests reviewing, to finals problem-settings and organizing. Right before the last Finals in Cancun, I talked with chenjb and decided to formalize the structure of our organization and create a committee structure. We now have the Organizing Committee lead by chenjb, the Scientific Committee lead by me, and the Technical Committee lead by me and cubercsl. To be fair, we are still at a very preliminary stage in deciding how we can cooperate, especially they all have a busier life tham me — let's see if we can improve in the coming season.
Semifinals and Finals
Ok, let us not end the post with all those shit memories. Like last season, our next event will be the Semifinals on Aug 24 11:00 (UTC), which will be a contest that the winners could advance to The 3rd Universal Cup Finals in 2026.
While we haven’t finalized the date and format of the Finals yet, we’re aiming to invite around 20 teams. The exact qualification rules will be published next week, and details about the Finals will follow a few months later.
If you would like to join us and win a place in the Finals, stay tuned for our Semifinals! This will be the last chance to win a finalist slot in this season!
Season 4 Schedules?
Awesome question. We need some time to make adjustments (such as implementing the updates I mentioned above) and to prepare for our semifinals. The first trial stage, as a tradition, will be based on the NAC 2025 problemset (of course, unrated). Then, we may host a few "pre-World Finals warmup" stages in July and August, but the schedule will ramp up starting September.
We can't say an exact date for the start, but no worries — the first a few trial stages (if any) will be unrated.
Okay... This post definitely goes too long. In the all last, on behalf of the Universal Cup committee, I would like to thank all those valuable feedbacks from tourist, OddImage, le0n, zhoukangyang, -14, Qiulyqwq, the team HoMaMaOvO (hos.lyric, maroonrk, maspy), the team Lumina (Kubic, Crystally, JoesSR), the team Brno (Baiyu0123, D14051, ice_cup), and many other Anonymous teams. Also, a big thank you for your reading, and for your continued support of the Universal Cup. If you have any more feedbacks and suggestions, please, let us know! We'd love to hear your voice!
