Traditionally, SnarkNews runs two New Year Contests.
The New Year Blitz Contest (Multiple Language Round) will start at 18:00 31.12.2018 and ends at 06:00 01.01.2019 Moscow Time. Contest consists of 12 problems. Some of those problems are based on problems, used at official or training contests in 2018. Contest rules are based on the ICPC system with two important modifications.
Penalty time is calculated as distance between time of first successful submit for the contestant on this problem and 0:00:00 01.01.2019, i.e. successful submissions at 23:50:00 31.12.2018 and at 0:10:00 01.01.2019 will both have penalty time 10 minutes (600 seconds).
Multiple Language Round rule: If for the first successful submit for the contestant on the some problem was used the programming language, which was never used by this contestant in his previous first successful submits on other problems, contestant receives language bonus: his summary penalty time is decreased by 100 minutes (6000 seconds). Note that different implementations of the same language are counting as same language, i.e. Java 6 and Java 7 are both counted as Java, C++ 32 bit and C++11 64 bit both as C++. Additionally, C and C++ are counted as same programming language.
Contest will be running on Yandex.Contest system. Link for registration and participation.
15'th Prime New Year Contest will start at 03:00 30.12.2018 and finish at 15:00 23.01.2019 Moscow time. Traditionally, Prime New Year Contest consists of problems, which were presented at team programming contests in 2018 and never solved on the contest. Because for 2018 list of those problems is big, the contest time is doubled compared to previous years. For the Prime New Year contest plain ICPC rules are used.
Idea of Prime Contest was first implemented by Andrey Lopatin and Nick Dourov at Summer Petrozavodsk training camp at 2003; in Russian word "Prostoj" used in meanings "prime" and "easy", so, contest was called "Prostoj contest" but was composed of extremelly hard problems, numbered with prime numbers (2,3,5 etc). Since then such a numeration is traditionally used for contests, consisting of very hard problems only.
Contest will be running on Yandex.Contest system. Link for registration and participation.
Both contests have English statements. Registration is open till the end of the contest.
