Since the three team members share one computer, organisation and teamwork are very important. Teams are allowed to bring to the competition any written material that they consider can be useful, such as books, papers, manuals, code printouts, etc. The fees are typically paid for by the department that the competing team is representing. The fees are used to pay for the prizes and other competition expenses, such as establishing competition sites, food, travel, etc. The email server is a close approximation to the real competition environment.
People can request problems from the server in four different categories of difficulty.
Solutions may be submitted to the server where they are run against competition-like test data. The results are then emailed back to the person. Any difficulties, contact Craig Dillon direct. The ACS Programming Competition runs with the same format and the same type of problems than the ACM Programming Competition. The ACM Programming Competition has been running for 25 years and now involves over 600 teams from universities around the world.