adamant's blog

Osijek Competitive Programming Camp, Winter 2024
By adamant, 10 months ago, In English

Hi everyone!

Sponsored by

After successful camps last year (winter wrap, fall wrap), we are happy to announce that Osijek camp will be returning on 17.-25. February 2024 — just in time to prepare for the World Finals in... Maybe this spring? As well as several regional contests throughout the fall. The camp is hosted by the School of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Osijek and is brought to you by the organizing team of adamant and -is-this-fft-.

The camp is inspired by various competitive programming camps that we attended during our active years in ICPC, and is aimed to help college students prepare for ICPC regional contests and finals. The camp will consist of 7 ICPC-style contests and 2 days off.

If you want to get a feel of the contests, two contests from the last edition will be featured in Universal Cup contests soon:

  1. Estonia contest, scheduled on 2024.01.20.
  2. Delft contest, scheduled on 2024.02.03.

After Universal Cup rounds, the contests will also be uploaded to Codeforces gym.

Details

Participation fee for onsite participants is 150€ per person. It does not include regular meals, travel or accommodation. Some further details about location, travel and food options can be found on the website.

If you want to participate, but are unable to come onsite, we offer a reduced fee of 100€ per person for online participation. It is also possible to reduce fees individually if you are unable to attend some of the contests. This will be handled on a case-by-case basis.

We support and empathize with those affected by the ongoing war in Ukraine, therefore we offer a 100€ discount for affected individuals and teams affiliated with Ukrainian institutions. In other words, the fees would be 50€ and 0€ per person for onsite and online participation correspondingly.

The expected starting time for the contests is 10am CET. For online participants, it is still a preferred starting time, but we will make accommodations for other starting times.

Most of our contests are fresh and developed for this camp. A small number of contests may be based on previous contests that have not been released to the general public. If you have seen some problems of a contest before, you can't participate on that day (and your participation fee will be reduced accordingly). We will privately contact participants who might be affected. Based on feedback, we will have a silence period until the end of World Finals 2023, during which camp materials will not be released to the public. Therefore, we ask participants to not discuss the problems in public until that date.

Participants

If you are interested in participating, please fill the form here.

We ask you to register before February 9 if you want to participate online and before February 3 if you want to participate onsite.

Also, if your university or organization has a lively ICPC community that may be interested in attending the camp, and you have some contacts of people in charge (e.g. coaches) we would highly appreciate if you could fill the form here, so that we can send an invitation. Thanks!

Problemsetters

We'd like to thank and praise the authors of the contests in the camp:

  • qwerty787788 — ICPC 2015 World Champion, Google HashCode 2019 and 2020 winner, CodeChef SnackDown 2016 and 2019 winner.
  • antontrygubO_o — author of 1188B - Count Pairs.
  • jeroenodb — Codeforces International Grandmaster, Computational geometry enjoyer. NWERC 2023 silver medalist.
  • 998kover — IOI gold medalist, problemsetter for IZhO and data structure enjoyer.
  • TheScrasse — Codeforces International Grandmaster, SWERC 2023 silver medalist, Codeforces coordinator.
  • KLPP — Codeforces International Grandmaster, SWERC 2023 silver medalist, IOI silver medalist.
  • Lebossle — Codeforces Grandmaster, problemsetter for ICPC Latin America 2021+.
  • adamant — Codeforces Grandmaster, maintainer of cp-algorithms.com, Osijek camp organizer, author of over 60 competitive programming problems.
  • gen — ICPC 2012 and 2014 world finalist, Google Hashcode 2017 finalist, coauthor of 7 Codeforces contests.
  • de_sousa — SWERC 2023 silver medalist.
  • flamestorm — MIT student, author of over 50 competitive programming problems.

... And others. We would also like to thank Um_nik and errorgorn for their help with reviewing problem proposals.

You can find more details about contest rules and technical setup on the website.

Sponsors

Last but not least, we would like to say special thanks to our sponsors, who make the camp possible. If you are interested in sponsoring next editions of the camp or have any questions, please feel free to reach out at ocpc (at) mathos (dot) hr.

We would also like to thank Codeforces for guidance and promoting this announcement to the main page, eolymp for providing us an online judge for the contests and the School of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Osijek for all their organizational support and providing us a physical location to conduct the camp.

Finally, we kindly thank ICPC foundation for their help and support.

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10 months ago, # |
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I've participated in the camp last time. The problem was awesome, and the discussion session helps me a lot.

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10 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +68 Vote: I do not like it

Are russian teams allowed to participate?

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    10 months ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +49 Vote: I do not like it

    As a matter of policy, we do not allow teams to represent Russian institutions. However, as a compromise, we occasionally allow Russian people to participate as private individuals, as long as we do not have to issue invitations to Russian institutions, do not accept payments from Russian institutions and the team agrees not to include any affiliation with a Russian institution in the scoreboard, or the team name.

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10 months ago, # |
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I have participated in the first iteration of the camp. The problems were very good, the discussion very helpful and the atmosphere perfect for learning. I gained a lot from the camp and will definitely join this iteration too

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10 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +4 Vote: I do not like it

OTZ

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10 months ago, # |
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What is the minimum level requirement? Will I learn much as a beginner?

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    10 months ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +26 Vote: I do not like it

    We aim to follow Petrozavodsk camp difficulty level. As such, we expect the camp to be most meaningful experience for people at Codeforces division 1 and above. It is not a hard requirement for participation, but people on lower skill level may not find it as helpful.

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10 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -27 Vote: I do not like it

:)

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10 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -23 Vote: I do not like it

Bro ...

So much money ...

In this much money, I can get a honey ;)

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10 months ago, # |
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Is Asian teams allowed to participate?

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    10 months ago, # ^ |
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    Yes. They're welcome to participate online. If they want to come onsite, they will be welcomed too, but we currently have a somewhat limited availability for visa support, if it is needed.

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10 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -22 Vote: I do not like it

jane street orz

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10 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -48 Vote: I do not like it

Happy New Year to everybody!!)

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10 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +2 Vote: I do not like it

How will Ukrainian institution teams get the discount?

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    10 months ago, # ^ |
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    They should indicate their affiliation in the registration form and/or in reply to our initial registration confirmation email.

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10 months ago, # |
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"We support and empathize with those affected by the ongoing war in Ukraine, therefore we offer a 100€ discount for affected individuals and teams affiliated with Ukrainian institutions."

What about those affected by war in Sudan / Palestine ?

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    10 months ago, # ^ |
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    As we're hosting the camp with some focus on European participation, and because I personally have a lot of background both in Russia and Ukraine, the conflict in Ukraine is more relevant and important to us right now compared to other ongoing conflicts in the world, and we know much more about what's going on in Ukraine to take an informed stance about it.

    I would prefer not to delve much deeper into the rationale behind this, as it would contradict Mike's recent request to avoid politically sensitive topics that go outside the scope of Codeforces. I do not wish to start a holy war, and I apologize if someone perceives our emphasis on the conflict in Ukraine as diminishing towards their personal struggle due to the conflict in their home country.

    To address your question, we're not currently able to make a public offer of bulk discounts related to all the other possible conflicts in the world. However, if a particular team is genuinely interested in participating in the camp, and feels like they're affected by a conflict of similar nature, and it would be fair to them to provide a similar discount, I am willing to discuss it privately and try to reach an individual agreement about the terms of their participation. A preferable way to do this, if the case arises, is via the email ocpc (at) mathos (dot) hr.

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10 months ago, # |
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  1. Is a USACO Gold participant at a fit level for this camp?
  2. Do you have some discord/group to find team virtual team members if you don't have them?
  3. As a participant in the US, is it possible to adjust starting times(such as a minimum of 3 hours back, or 13am CET, in which it will be 6am on my side)?
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    10 months ago, # ^ |
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    1. We generally target the difficulty level somewhere between ICPC regional contests and finals. This means that, in our expectation, one should be at least Div. 1 on Codeforces for participation to be a meaningful experience. It's hard for us to compare it with USACO levels, as we're not very familiar with the system.
    2. We create a Discord server for each camp, but it's usually done closer to the beginning of the camp, and mostly serves to coordinate participation. We do not have a public permanent "general" camp-related server.
    3. All online participants will have an opportunity to start within a 24h window after the start of the onsite contest.

    I'd also like to note that since the camp is aimed for ICPC preparation, rather than school olympiads, a lot of problems may deviate significantly from topics in IOI syllabus and may require more advanced mathematics and algorithms that people more typically learn in college.

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10 months ago, # |
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Hi all! This is a comment to bump this post into recent actions, and a reminder that the registration for online participation closes in 4 days, on February 9, 2024. If you want to attend the camp, please don't forget to fill in the registration form. We're looking forward to the camp!

P.S. If you missed the registration deadline, but still want to participate, don't hesitate to write us a letter on the official email, or in direct messages to me. We will try our best to accommodate.

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