As a Christmas/New Year special event, the 2nd Universal Cup Prime Contest is scheduled from Dec 24 (after the end of the last window of Stage 15) to Jan 6 (before the start of the first window of Stage 17). Registration of the contest will be opened soon.

We hope that this contest will be a great entertaining event for the Christmas to New Year period. Wish you all a good time!

Contest format

The contest will start on Dec 24, 2023, at 12:00 (UTC +8) and end on Jan 6, 2024, at 00:00 (UTC +8). It will last 300 hours in total.

There will be about 40 problems in total, which were the tasks that were not solved by anyone during the contest in the following contests:

• The Universal Cup regular stages in 2023.
• The contests written by the Universal Cup committee members in 2022 and 2023, including ICPC Regional Contests, CCPC Contests, training camp contests, and (Chinese) Olympiad in Informatics.
• Other contests submitted by the contest authors.

Additional tasks might be added during the contest.

Rules

Due to the special format of the contest, the rules of the contest will be different from the regular stages.

• You are allowed to use any internet materials and any pre-written codes written by your team.
  • In particular, you are allowed to submit any tasks that were previously solved by your team, as long as they were finished by yourself. Copy-pasting other's solutions is strictly prohibited in the contest.
• There will be no restrictions on the number of computers you used in the contest.

Ranking

The competition will be ranked in descending order of the first keyword by the number of solved problems, and ascending order of the second keyword by the time penalty.

The Penalty rules are different from the regular universal cup stages.

The penalty for a problem is the the time elapsed from the beginning of the contest to the submission of the first accepted run. The total penalty of the team is the maximum penalty of all solved problems.

Every wrong submission of a solved problem will add the total penalty by $20$ minutes.

The scoreboard will not be frozen in the contest. It is available during the whole contest window.

In the interest of contributing to the community and bridging the gap between competitive programming and industry, we are happy to announce that in the future, Universal Cup will be cooperating with Huawei in many areas.

Huawei will support Universal Cup in future seasons. In the meantime, we will explore the cutting-edge challenges from the industry together as an additional activity during the Universal Cup season. These events might also serve as parts of other official programming competitions. Moreover, we intend to run some interviews and other events together, providing opportunities for communication between participants and the industry. We also hope that in the future, we can invite the top competitive programming teams to compete in the Universal Cup Onsite Final. It will definitely be one of the best events ever! Please stay tuned and support Universal Cup!

About Universal Cup

The Universal Cup is a non-profit organization dedicated to offering training resources for competitive programming teams. Up to now, there are more than 2600 teams from all over the world registering for Universal Cup. With the permission of contest setters and without involving copyright disputes, the Universal Cup will hold mirror contests for some undisclosed competition sets. We will simulate the actual situation in the competition, executing the board freeze in the last hour. At the same time, we will provide an overall rating board, which will help the team to make a reasonable assessment of itself.

If you want to find a more detailed introduction or participate in this season, please visit: https://ucup.ac

About Huawei

Founded in 1987, Huawei is a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. We have 207,000 employees and we operate in more than 170 countries and regions, serving more than three billion people around the world.

Our vision and mission is to bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. To this end, we will work towards ubiquitous connectivity and inclusive network access, laying the foundation for an intelligent world, providing diversified computing power where you need it, when you need it, to bring cloud and intelligence to all four corners of the earth; build digital platforms to help all industries and organizations become more agile, efficient, and dynamic; and redefine user experience with AI, making it smarter and more personalized for people in all aspects of their life, whether they're at home, on the go, in the office, having fun, or working out.

For more information, please visit Huawei online at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/Huawei, http://www.twitter.com/Huawei, http://www.facebook.com/Huawei, http://www.youtube.com/Huawei

This post is a brief manual for the Universal Cup Contest System, detailing the system interface's functionality. We recommend every team familiarize themselves with this guide to get the most out of our system. This post will take approximately 5 minutes to read.

Log in to the System

To log in, click on the Login button located in the top right corner of the website. You must use the login credentials provided to you. You will not be able to enter the contest if you have not logged in with the account we have provided you with.

Usernames follow the format: ucup-teamXXX or ucup-teamXXXX. If you possess credentials from the previous season of the Universal Cup, remember to prefix your username with ucup-. For instance, if your old username was team001, it should now be ucup-team001.

If you have any problems logging into the system, please contact the committee for assistance.

Register for the Contest

Browse the contest list to see past and upcoming contests. If you wish to participate in a future contest, click on its name to navigate to the registration page.

On the registration page, you will have the option to select a time window for participation. Please select the contest window carefully. You will not be able to make changes once the contest has started.

If you would like to change your chosen time window before the start of the contest, you can see a deregister button near the contest name. Click on this button to deregister in order to reselect the time window.

Participate in the Contest

Once your chosen time window begins, you can access the contest page and view the tasks. A live scoreboard is also available for tracking the current standings.

The contest page's bottom right corner will list any attachments pertinent to the contest, typically containing the complete PDF statements for all tasks. You can download and print the complete problemset.

For each problem, the problem page might feature up to 4 tabs:

• Statement: the PDF statement for this problem. It should be the same as the one in the complete .pdf problemset.
• Submit: submit your solution in this problem. You can select the language you would like to use and fill in the codes, or submit a file directly. In the output-only tasks, you might be asked to upload the answer file directly.
• Custom Test: the way to run your solution in the judging server. You can run any code and customize the input in the Custom Test tab. Your solution will be running in the same judging server as the grading one. This can help you solve problems that may arise due to the varying performance of the machines.
• Attachments: the attachments for this problem. It will contains the sample testcases in this problem. Other resources, such as large samples, source codes in the statements or any other files that needed to be distributed, will also be included in the attachments.

Submitting Your Solutions

Once you have finished your solution, you can submit it to the corresponding problem. The judging will be started once you submit your solution successfully. The verdict AC (or score 100) means you solved the problem perfectly. Otherwise, you will receive the corresponding verdicts.

You can view the judge details by clicking the submission ID. It will show the judging details on each test case.

Once the contest has been finished, you will be able to see the preview of the testcase by clicking the status bar.

Asking Questions and Receiving Clarifications

If you have any questions about the tasks, judging systems or contest participation, you can ask the questions in the contest page. You will be able to receive notifications as soon as the clarifications are available.

The contest page will also contains the list of all the clarifications were made. Any important information about the tasks and judging systems will be available there.

Upsolving and Virtual Contests

After your contest window finishes, you can continue solving problems. However, these submissions won't influence the scoreboard.

If you missed some contest, you can participate in it virtually. Virtually doing a contest won't update the rating of your team, so it is just for practice. To do that, you can enter the contest page and found the virtual contest bar in the right corner of the page. Virtual contest will be available after all the windows of the contest finished.

Code Visibilities

You can change whether or not to share the solution code on the Personal Information page. By default, the solution is hidden to others. If you choose to share your solution code, others will be able to view your solution by accessing your submission.