HC3 Prize Contest II

The HC3 Prize Contest II offers a prize of a Computer Science related book of your choice, subject to a price limit, to anyone who completes 8 or more problems successfully. The price limit is $100 if all 10 problems are completed, and $75 if only 8 or 9 problems are completed. Harvard College students may participate. There are some limitations below on the number of prizes that may be given out.

The problems in this contest involve puzzling variations on standard computer science algorithms. Many of these problems are taken from the Northeast American Regional ACM contest, to which a Harvard team goes yearly, and in which the team must do very well in order to go on to World Finals.

The problem descriptions are on this web page. The contestants must obtain an account from the contest manager:

walton@seas.harvard.edu (that's seas and NOT fas)

The contest rules are

• You must code and debug your solutions yourself. You may NOT show your code or debugging runs to others.
• You may get help in finding algorithms, and may read problems and discuss the algorithmic, NON-CODING, aspects of problems with others.
• You should bring any other possible questions of ethics to the attention of the contest manager above. Rulings on such matters will be placed on this web page.
• To win, a contestant must solve all 10 problems in the contest before the end of the Spring Recess in the contestant's senior year.
• There is currently a limit of 4 prizes available. See the scoreboard for the status of contestants. We hope to increase the prize limit fast enough so it will have no affect, and to maintain this contest for several years; but none of this is guarenteed, and we must reserve the right to close this contest and cease giving prizes at any time.

We have not yet released all 10 problems for this contest. We plan to release the remaining problems in a well timed manner.

• Contest Details
• Help and Demos Files
• Scoreboard
• Annotated Index of Problems
• The problems and their files are as follows. Note that files with extensions .txt, .html, .htm, .ps, .pdf contain problem descriptions, while Makefile files describe how the autojudge runs solutions.

  	Problem		Files
  	blackbox		blackbox.html Makefile
  	committee		committee.html Makefile
  	continuo		continuo.html Makefile
  	nurikabe		nurikabe.html Makefile
  	sheep		sheep.html Makefile wolf
  	sudoku		sudoku.html Makefile
  	zofkaspuzzle		zofkaspuzzle.html Makefile

If you have questions email the manager of this web page at walton@seas.harvard.edu