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Welcome to the 2012 Queue ICPC Challenge!

The Final Tournament has ended. Congratulations to the winners!

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See the Queue-ICPC Groogle Group at http://groups.google.com/group/qicpc for more questions and answers.

 

Q1: Catch Action


I'm signing up for this year's programming competition after thoroughly enjoying last year's contest. I was reading over the game rules, and I have a question. I don't understand the value of the catch action. As far as I can tell, the game engine does not provide any information about thrown snowballs, so how would a player ever know when it would be appropriate to execute a catch action? Am I missing something fundamental?

- Dean Holbrook

A:

I'm responsible for implementing the snowball game. I worked with David Van Brackle in developing the problem.

You're right that you can't see a snowball in flight. They always travel to their destinations in just one turn so there's never a snowball in flight while a player is choosing a move.

It seems like you could do two things with a catch. You could coordinate with another teammate to get a pre-made snowball quickly. Alternatively, you could guess that an opponent is going to throw one at you and you could defend yourself with a catch.

- David

 

Q2: 3D


I can not get the 3D visualization to work. JOGL is in my CLASSPATH but java complains about not being able to load GLCanvas. Can you provide the commands that you used to get this visualization to work? Perhaps a link to the version of JOGL that you are using?

- Tim Leonard

A:

It looks like I'm using jogl-2.0-b266-20101223-linux-i586. I've made this work under os X and under Linux. I don't think I've tried windows recently, but I know I've made it work in the past.

I put all the shared libraries and selected jar files (gluegen-rt.jar jogl.all.jar nativewindow.all.jar and newt.all.jar) under lib/jogl in my home directory. Then, I run the following from the shell prompt.

export CLASSPATH=.:~/lib/jogl/jogl.all.jar:~/lib/jogl/nativewindow.all.jar:~/lib/jogl/gluegen-rt.jar:~/lib/jogl/newt.all.jar
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:~/lib/jogl

setup on the mac was almost the same:

export CLASSPATH=.:~/lib/jogl/jogl.all.jar:~/lib/jogl/nativewindow.all.jar:~/lib/jogl/gluegen-rt.jar:~/lib/jogl/newt.all.jar
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH:~/lib/jogl

You probably want to also add icypc.jar to your classpath, or you could just expand it in the current directory.

- David

 

Q3: Game Speed


I'm glad to see there's another ICPC Challenge. I just have one question. The game simulator looks great, but running through an entire match seems to take a while. Is there any option to speed it up, such as by decreasing the amount of time each player takes to move or by running the simulator without a display?

- Chris Spencer

A:

It looks like, if you have two real players (as opposed to leaving one of the player slots blank) and you write the match to a trace file, it will complete the match as quickly as it can, continuing with each step as soon as both players have responded with a move. You can then see the results of the match and view with the trace player at a faster speed if you want.

The match I just tried finished in about 2.5 seconds like this.

- David

 

Q4: username


I don't remember my username but need that to retrieve my password. Help?

A:

Send me an email at slaybaugh@hq.acm.org and I'll try to help.
- Matt

 

Q5: Player not Compiling


"There was a problem with your latest player submission... Your player did not compete in any matches."

A:

The most common reasons that a player did not compile is that no files were actually submitted or not all of the files were submitted. Make sure you have chosen all the files in the form before submitting.
- Matt

 

Q6: Username not recognized


Despite confirming my username, I still can't log in.

A:

This is unusual, but at least 2 users had to type their username in all lowercase, despite it including some uppercase characters.
We haven't been able to find a solution for this, but it seems to be related to whether you have a 'member' ACM account as opposed to a 'non-member' ACM account. Regardless, if you have trouble logging in, try again with the username in all lowercase.
- Matt

 

See the Queue-ICPC Groogle Group at http://groups.google.com/group/qicpc for more questions and answers.




Thanks to IBM, the ICPC Collaborative Learning Institute, Baylor University, and Dr. David Sturgill for hosting this contest on the IBM Virtual Machine Center at Baylor. Thanks also to IBM's Tim DeBoer who pioneered the tournament problem model in the ICPC Challenge from 2002-2006.

(Information about the previous Queue ICPC Challenge from January 2011 is available here)