1500 USD, contrary to what you may think this is not the price of an NBA finals ticket, it's the registration fees for ACPC (Arab Collegiate Programming Contest), no flight tickets included with mediocre accommodation.
These fees, However, included long opening and closing ceremonies in both of which we had to endure Mohammad Fouad's very dull and lame jokes (one of his childish doings: he stopped the opening ceremony, made us all stand then laughed and told us to sit down...).
Being funny was definitely not their strongest suit. Nor was organization for that matter, atrocious organization with hours spent exposed to extreme Egypt weather.
In addition to all of this, we had to starve our way through the competition with the very cheap and inedible food they provided.
The most suspicious part was that they only accepted cash payments in dollars (they refused bank transfers or any other traceable payment methods) only dollars and only in CASH !!!!!!!
You are probably wondering why I'm posting this with a fake account and to answer this question we'll have to backtrack and see the ACPC behavior patterns:
Last time someone complained about the awful circumstances, their team was immediately DISQUALIFIED and only authorized to participate after a great deal of pressure on the ACPC committee see first comment here for more details
Someone also thought about sending the complaint to the ICPC committee, well they ended up forwarding it to the ACPC committee which, unsurprisingly, disqualified the team.
Last time the competition was held outside of egypt was in JORDAN 2012 (with a reasonable 200 usd participation fee + THEY ACCEPTED BANK TRANSFERS)
I don't know if the ICPC committee knows about this ongoing robbery happening every year but this has got to stop, this is painting a very bad image for the contest as well as ICPC.
It appears that no one is prepared to take the blow and expose Mohammad Fouad and his mob of thieves.
ONCE MORE if you didn't pay attention : The fees are 1500 USD for official teams and 3000 USD for unofficial teams (without flight tickets)
The official excuse for this ongoing robbery is that the hotel is top notch with world class features and accommodation. First of all, the hotel we stayed at this year is nowhere near what's described. In fact it was very mediocre.
Second, no one asked for luxury. We are all competitive programming enthusiasts and participate for the mere experience of the contest itself. No one here is expecting a 5 stars accommodation which may I add lot of us can not afford in the first place.
The ball now is in the ICPC committee's court, they have to act immediately to stop this nonsense otherwise they as as much to blame as ACPC for this FRAUD.
*committee not comity
The ICPC committee doesn't care. If someone doesn't participate, that doesn't affect them.
Edited,thanks for the correction.
Could you share more information about the venue and accommodation?
last years it was this hotel : https://www.maritim.com/en/hotels/egypt/resort-casino-sharm-el-sheikh/hotel-overview with rooms "half board"
this year was in this hotel : Parrotel Aqua Park Resort, which was shitty one and much less expensive than the last one and guess what they didn't change the fees at all
The contestants were accomodated at "Parrotel aqua park", the judges and volunteers were accomodated in another hotel called "Tolip Inn" and the contest was held in a sports arena.
For the closing ceremony, they rented a whole place called Lucky Night in the mountains of sharm el sheikh where they organize safaries (pretty expensive as you would imagine) Again we did not ask for such luxury alot of the qualified teams were unable to participate due to such high fees.
one comment to you, Parrotel Aqua Park Resort is 4 stars not 5
Yes corrected it, anyways their food/services were extremely bad.
How can a person this corrupt be one of the ICPC directors?!!!!!!
I can see clearly see fraud in his face.
Ok now this is just a witch hunt. I get it, ACPC is corrupt and sucks but somehow associating and blaming a specific person seems like irrational angry mob behavior. We can't assume who's to blame in what.
if something X goes wrong for many many years you should blame the responsible to X because he didn't find a solution to the problem even if he can easly identify it. in the case of acpc i think the people to blame are exactly the acpc director Mohammad Fouad and his colleagues because they are the people behind acpc and they should find a solution years ago for this organized students robbery! shame on the acpc committee!
More like you can see fraud in his name.
The hotel was literally a joke, food really sucks, most of the time I had to buy food from local restaurants, There was no hot water in the rooms I participated in the contest with bad flu because I had to take a cold shower. This was one of my worst experiences.
I've heard so many terrible things about ACPC that I started to believe that something is not right. And maybe I just want to see the world burn, but my suggestion is to spam the social media of ICPC, maybe they will react somehow.
Most likely they'll react by deleting these posts, but that's a good start. If that won't help, I suggest writing emails to global sponsors — ICPC officials don't listen to participants, but they'll sure listen to money.
That would be pretty extreme. We don't want to scare all of the sponsors from the global competition.
From what I understand, people over there are being robbed and when they try to do something with that they are being told to fuck off, or worse, they receive threats.
Many years in a row.
I bet you would think differently, if you were in that region ;)
Not like the sponsorships are there to prevent extreme fees. OTOH I don't think the sponsors will care either, at worst they'll pull out and get quickly persuaded by ICPC to not pull out. The amount of damage dissatisfied competitive programmers can do to anyone who makes the contest run is practically negligible.
If it worked in The Shawshank Redemption I have no reason to disagree with it.
Perhaps the only way out is a massive demarche, then the directorate will pay attention to the drop in the number of participants in the region.
Of cource, if they haven't already paid attention.
GL anyway, this is terrible sh*t.
I don't think the ICPC are going to do anything about it, in fact some members of the ICPC committee went on a luxury trip around Egypt with ACPC committee's members just after the ACPC ended.
I wonder how they funded such a trip............
Source?
Photo from ACPC Official Page
Another problem that ACPC adds to its list of problems like the visa of palestinians students, I think i will graduate before this problems be solved
This year we spent a whole month collecting donations to reach them but our Visas got refused like the previous years. I think the simple solution is to ban Egypt from organizing the ACPC, this would lead to changing the corrupted organizers of the ACPC and giving the chance for all involved countries to participate which solves all the problems.�� Add to that, Mohamed Fouad (ACPC Director) made fun of the participated teams with zero tries while announcing the results, and those teams were only the Visa rejected teams.
Totally agree with your comment except one point (banning Egypt from hosting the contest) maybe more countries should host the contest but banning Egypt is not a good solution(especially if we can find an agreement with the authorities to ease the VISA process) Egyptians welcomed us with open arms and were very gentle and kind, I don't think the ACPC committee acts/crimes should make us make wrong judgement about Egyptians.
Nevertheless, if Egypt is meant to continue hosting the contest, some deal should be found with the Egyptian authorities about the VISA issue (I understand that there are security measures and checks that have to be made but perhaps they could accelerate the process for people participating in the contest)
I think you missed this: https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/71822
I was the president of the ICPC Mansoura Community when we were organizing our local contest to qualify for ECPC (they are the same organizers of ACPC), now I'm not by the way. But I would like to add that during that time, their supervisors were very rude and insulting and kept threatening us to cancel the local if we don't just take their insults, and even when we spoke to the main organizers they were rude. The only thing that let us just hold it in was the many enthusiast programmers in our community who were very excited to participate in a contest related to ICPC.
When our faculty member team leader saw this plus the extravagant fees, he of course understood those scamming ways and encouraged us to restrain from participating in ACPC, and we did that indeed. I only hoped we could do it with a statement so that other universities feeling the same way would restrain as well because that's the only way that would really make a change.
RESPECT
I totally agree with this post but i want to add some points to show how those awful people make use of students to steal money . 1 — Many ACPC members are from Fouad's family and colse friends under the name of many fake positions who really don't relate to competition and don't add a value to it . 2 — the number of qualified teams to ACPC ( especially from ECPC ) is changable every year from same university or faculty and no one what 's the real and fair criteria for qualifying them !! 3- the awful extensions given for some participants who have exceeded the allowed age 4 — some teams don't pay a dollar in ACPC if they have strong connections with ACPC community , so why you prevent some people from participating if they don't pay and others can do it without paying a single dollar ! Please Stop this gang from stealing us , as we will never act as children again and remember that " man gets what he is fucking deserve!! "
what is even more important: You pay 1500 USD, and it is unrated!
Let's take a look at the ICPC world finals results through the past few years, especially at the teams representing the ACPC region : (results according to icpc.baylor.edu)
ICPC 2019 : ACPC region champions got 21st place
ICPC 2018 : ACPC region champions got 56th place
ICPC 2017 : ACPC region champions got 56th place
ICPC 2016 : ACPC region champions got honorable mention
ICPC 2015 : ACPC region champions got 64th place
ICPC 2014 : ACPC region champions got 45th place
ICPC 2013 : ACPC region champions got 60th place
ICPC 2012 : ACPC region champions got honorable mention
......
Moreover, these are not their actual standings in the contest, these are their standing according to the number of problems that they solved (without taking time penalty into account).
What I want to say is that if you spend these huge amounts of money on sending these teams to training camps or maybe hiring some professionals to train them, you could achieve better results in the world finals.
Another year, another grand theft organized by the ACPC.
ACPC 2020 will be held in March 2021 and guess what ? The entry fees are 1500$/team.
They want another 1500$ this year, I'm from a public university that can't sponsor us. My father's salary is nearly 400$, apparently I have to ask him to take a loan to be able to pay the fees of this contest ! Is programming only reserved for wealthy people in African and Arab countries ??? They just took away from us the opportunity to do the thing we love the mostt which is COMPETITIVE PROGRAMMING, we did not ask for much, we don't want no money we just want to participate without paying the MIND-BOGGLING 1500 DOLLARS..
What a scandal ! SHAMEEEEEEEEEEE on you ICPC for standing by and watching this theft taking place year after year ....