Today, participants registered for the ICPC Amritapuri regionals received the following mail excerpt:
"We all are going through tough times in our lives. Education & work have been disrupted equally. I was trying to host the ICPC Regional in the month of July but got delayed because of some technical reasons. Now, the decision has been made at ICPC Headquarters to host the world finals at Moscow during the first two weeks of October. Chances are that the teams qualifying in the 2020 Regional (the current contest, to be held in August 2021) may be qualified for the Moscow World Finals. The contest will be held on August 14th 06:00 PM. In that case, we can have only one round of the contest to qualify for the World Finals to be held at Moscow."
This makes it seem like the WF2021 will be merged with WF2020, and it is called the "Moscow World Finals". This, ofcourse, opens up a can of worms — what will happen to individuals who qualify through different teams, for instance? Will multiple teams from the same university be allowed to participate, or will the ones who qualified for WF2021 be retroactively disqualified? Or are just the locations the same, and we will have two different competitions at Moscow? Will our eligibility ages etc be extended to allow us to qualify for another World Finals?
If anyone has more information — please, let the rest of us know.
In my region I too heard rumors that this merge is indeed very likely and that the world finalists from 2019-20 and 2020-21 season will indeed be competing in the same WF. In Brazil coincidentally there is no contestant who qualified for both editions. This is weird but I guess its true. I hope they make 2 different contests, even if they happen in consecutive days, but so far this is not their plan.
Zero credibility in my opinion.
This plot is getting thicker than a Christopher Nolan movie.
I'm afraid to express hatred towards this announcement, because each time icpc organizers outline New Final Info it somehow even worse than the previous one
EDIT: Happy to find out that it seemingly not true.
In the official North America announcements they said World Finals 2021 was scheduled for late March 2022. Here's an announcement made in November:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HOG5jDCxf8LGZYCHWRFBiVq9AqUeEs5c/view?usp=drivesdk
I'm not aware of any other official information about World Finals 2021.
I want to say that this can't be real, but after the trainwreck that has been WF2020 in general I fully believe in the ability of ICPC to make a decision this awful.
Some more information regarding this, the Asia Amritapuri site RCD sent out a mail today, which among other things contained these statements:
There is NO merger of the World Finals 2020 & 2021
2021 World Finals will happen only in 2022.
In this context it seems that the previous statements made by the Amritapuri regional were likely just poorly worded.
Dear ICPC Contestant,
Greetings from the ICPC Asia Amritapuri Site!
Here is an important update for you!
ICPC Asia Amritapuri Site has decided two rounds of contests as announced earlier. This is as per the suggestions from the judging committee to host a quality contest.
Practice session will be on July 31, 2021. 06.00 to 08.30 PM, 2.5 hours.
Preliminary Round contest will be held on August 7, 2021. 06:00 to 08:30 PM, 2.5 hours.
Regional Round will be on August 14, 2021. 06:00 to 11:00 PM, 5 hours.
Last date for the cancellation of teams to participate in the other sites: August 5, 05:00 PM.
Amrita will NOT be charging any registration fees for the preliminary round. Teams who are selected for the onsite round will be charged INR 700.
There were few queries found on several online platforms, here are the answers.
The ICPC Registration system was moved to the cloud recently. There were issues faced by the teams after this migration. The reason for the delay in the contest was that we were not able to get the data in the right format.
There is NO merger of the World Finals 2020 & 2021, or the merger of Regional Contests hosted by Amrita. The world finals that were scheduled in Moscow last year is being planned for October 2021. 2019 Regional Toppers are considered for this World Finals. 2021 World Finals will happen only in 2022.
Regards,
Maheshwara Chaitanya
RCD, ICPC Asia Amritapuri Site.