Hi everyone,
I have a training problem and I think many of you have had it already, so I thought I'd ask. Our team from Wrocław qualified for the ICPC World Finals (yay!) and it would be good to practice on the past problems. Is there any way to do this as virtual participation in the past finals? Specifically, I'd like to have as many as possible of the following:
- online judge with the problems (UVa LiveArchive satisfies this)
- which is lenient on whitespace (it usually doesn't)
- ghost participants, live ranklist, seeing which problems have been solved up to this point etc.
I have found it hard to even find a precise ranklist (who solved which problem) for finals older than 2-3 years. There are no WF problemsets on acm.sgu.ru, nor here on CF Gym, and test data is only downloadable from ICPC website for 2011 up.
Am I too spoiled by the modern methods of preparation? :)
You can add a contest to Gym here. You need the data for that, but I'm sure it could be dug out if you ask the people responsible.
Before 2010s, ICPC was really secretive about their Finals' problems. No real test data or detailed scoreboard was ever published by them. Everything you can find about past Finals will be (at best) an educated guess. Including ICPC Live Archive, which contains re-created test data.
There are even well-founded rumours saying that before 2009 judging was done by hand, rather than automatic checker.
I would've never guessed that it was so bad not that long ago. Probably because I got to programming at the time when automatic judging was getting popular :D
Well, as long as the problems are available, the test data can be made. And having the original scoreboard is not necessary for training...
A remnant of this seems to be left here: http://icpc.baylor.edu/regionals/get-involved#HServeasajudge
During the contest, judges evaluate submissions by accepting or rejecting them. If the submissions are rejected, the judges provide a uniform diagnostic comment.
There was discussion about the same problem before WF 2013. It's in Russian though http://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/7888
The main part of it is virtual trainings do exist. They were open for Russian teams qualified to WF 2013. The guy who is in charge of that is snarknews — you can find him in the comments for that post. It's the same person who organizes OpenCup and other Russian major contests.
You can ask him to give your and probably other Polish teams access to those virtual contests. Probably it will not be free — he can ask you to make the contest for Petrozavodsk training camp but it's worth it so you should try:)
Thanks a million! Very informative link. I should really revise my Russian and google the Russian parts of CF in the future ;)
You can use HUST Online Judge to practice.
Add a virtual contest using problems from UVALive.
You can see the imported ranklist by click the spanner on right bottom of the ranklist page.
Sorry for my poor English. Maybe you can get more details in the FAQ.
Example
Kattis (my favourite online judge) have the World Finals problems from 2012 onwards. They are very lenient for whitespace, which is nice. They don't meet the criteria for your third point, though.
Here's the link: https://open.kattis.com/search?q=world+finals
Since, "kattis" is available on vjudge and you want to practice as a real time contest, you can "create your own contest" on vjudge and even upload previous ranklist in it in the option that show up.