Hello everyone, we are happy to announce that the 2nd Universal Cup has started officially.

The Universal Cup is a non-profit organization dedicated to offering training resources for competitive programming teams. Our website is https://ucup.ac/ (in English and Chinese).

In the previous season, over 750 teams from more than 300 affiliations all over the world, registered and participated in a total of 22 stages, encompassing contests from Asia, Europe, and America.

With the permission of contest setters and without involving copyright disputes, the Universal Cup will hold mirror contests for some undisclosed competition sets. It is expected to hold at least 20 contests in this season. 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.

Over the past few weeks, the committee has worked hard to schedule stages and try to improve the competing experience for participants. We are very excited to share some information here as a head up:

• In the upcoming 2nd Universal Cup, starting from September 2nd, 2023, we have already scheduled 14 high-quality stages from Asia and Europe mainly. The current schedule can be viewed on the main page of our website https://ucup.ac/. There are also 4 stages (expected on October 7th, 14th, 21st, and December 9th) in confirming. The schedule in the second half will also be updated later.

• We have managed to upgrade our judging system on QOJ, and we will use it as the contest platform starting this season. To provide more flexibility, instead of 3 fixed time windows, teams now can choose to start to compete in one of the following 5 windows as they want:

• • 13:00 — 18:00 (UTC+8) on Saturday -- 19:00 — 24:00 (UTC+8) on Saturday -- 02:00 — 07:00 (UTC+8) on Sunday

• For teams that have already registered, if they have done at least 3 contests in the previous season, their account will be preserved and enrolled into the current season automatically. Otherwise, the same as new teams, please register following the instructions on Registration.

• The official website has been upgraded. Now you are able to view all information from the previous by simply choosing the corresponding season on the website.

We expect to host the mirror contest on some Saturdays. To resolve the timezone issue, we plan on hosting three time windows:

There will be an independent scoreboard combining all previous results during each time window.

The first contest will be the 2022-2023 ICPC Shenyang Regional on January 28th. The second contest will be the 2022-2023 ICPC Hong Kong Regional on February 4th. The upcoming contests will be announced on the official website.

We require registration to participate in the Universal Cup, please follow the instruction on the official website.

Universal Cup Committee:

• Jingbang chenjb Chen
• Yuhao jqdai0815 Du
• Lingyu jiangly Jiang
• Yaowei Sugar_fan Lyu
• Qingyu Qingyu Shi
• Yaohui quailty Zeng

(Sorted by lexicographical order of the last name)