The ICPC Challenge gives participants a chance to compete in a different kind of programming contest; they compete through the choices and strategies of the programs they develop. This is an effort to continue and build on the efforts of the Java Challenge. The ICPC Challenge offers an exciting, open-ended problem that invites creativity. Success is a result of developing and implementing a robust player with a sound strategy and correctly anticipating the strategies employed by ones opponents. See the ICPC Challenge section of the ICPC website for more information on the challenge problem, previous offerings of the ICPC Challenge and its rules.
We make a distinction between the author of an ICPC Challenge problem and the team of developers responsible for implementation. In an effort to offer the most engaging competition possible, we invite problem submissions from anyone in the ICPC community. A volunteer implementation team will work with the problem author to develop and refine the problem. If you have an idea for a problem that you think we should offer, we want to consider it.
We invite the submission of problem proposals until October 30, 2010. Problem descriptions should be in PDF or MicroSoft Word format and should be emailed to the ICPC Challenge Director, David Sturgill () Proposals should focus on new problems that have not been previously offered or otherwise publicized.
All submitted proposals will remain confidential. This should make it possible to reuse an idea that is not selected as the 2011 problem. If the author wishes, a proposal may be resubmitted with or without modification for a future year. Alternatively, the author of a declined problem may choose to independently implement and offer the problem in a different competition.
Proposing a problem requires only a short, informal description of the problem. Typically, the implementation and testing phases require some adjustment to the problem description, so developing a very detailed description would probably amount to a lot of wasted effort. We offer a sample proposal as a guide for the length and level of detail that seems to be appropriate in a submitted problem description.
After the submission deadline, a problem will be chosen by the representatives of the finals host site, the ICPC Challenge director and the implementation team. The author of the selected problem will be expected to work with the implementation team and the host site to refine the problem description as necessary during implementation and testing.
As illustrated in the sample proposal, a problem should offer a sufficiently rich simulation environment that different players can be developed with varied play strategies. The problem should be suitable for visual display of the matches and should be playable in a reasonable number of discrete turns. As much as possible, the scoring system should be chosen so that it can give a total ordering of participants based on performance and so that trivial strategies cannot exploit loopholes.
The various members of the selection committee are expected to represent their own interests in choosing a problem. The implementation team will be sensitive to what problems can be implemented in the available time. The representative from the host may have an interest in problems that can be adapted to accentuate distinctive features of the site.