Contest Environment

Physical materials

Each student should have access to ONLY one computer. Additionally, students may bring:

• pens, spare paper, calculators and other stationery
• any number of books or other written material, including printed source code and handwritten notes.

Students are forbidden from having electronic equipment other than their computer and associated peripherals. For example, students cannot have mobile phones, tablets or smartwatches with them during the competition.

Software and electronic materials

Students must write programs in one of C, C++, Java and Python 3.

Students may not use any pre-written code stored electronically on their computer (other than the exceptions below). This includes code pre-written by the student, by a friend or teacher and code from textbooks.

Students are free to use any text editors (e.g. Sublime, Notepad, TextEdit), IDEs (e.g. Code Blocks, Eclipse, XCode) or shells (e.g. WSL, MinGW, Terminal, Bash) they have on their computer. This includes any documentation, compilers, or pre-written code samples that come installed with these.

Students will be provided (via the contest system) with solution templates. These are pre-written programs, available in each of the supported languages, which already perform the necessary file input and output for the student. Students are highly encouraged to use these templates as a basis for coding their own solutions to the problems.

Additionally, students may also access official language documentation on the following websites:

• C: https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language
• C++: https://en.cppreference.com/w/
• Java: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/docs/api/index.html
• Python 3: https://docs.python.org/3/

Any pre-written code provided on these sites can be freely used during the competition. These sites will be linked to from the contest website, for ease of access.

Online text editors and IDEs (e.g. ideone, groklearning) are allowed, but please be very careful not to accidentally make any code you write public.

Students must not access any websites other than the competition website and the exemptions listed above. For example, students are forbidden from accessing:

• Q&A websites and forums (e.g. Stackoverflow, Reddit)
• source code sharing websites (e.g. GitHub, Pastebin)
• private messaging websites (e.g. Messenger, Instagram)
• large language models and AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT, Github Copilot)