NCPC

Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest

NCPC 2020 will be held on Saturday November 7th 2020, 11-16 CET (UTC+1).

Note that this date has changed. The contest was previously planned to be held on October 3rd .

Contests:

What is the ICPC? top

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is a world-wide contest for students and professionals, with local and regional events, and a world final. The contest is about programming skills, problem solving and teamwork. In short terms, teams of up to three students try to solve as many programming problems as possible from a given problem set, using only one computer. See for example the problems from NCPC 2014 to get the general idea. You may use several different programming languages including C, C++, Python and Java.

The ICPC has grown to become very large. Thousands of teams from thousands universities world wide compete in the regional contests which lead up to the World Finals. Less than a hundred team get to go there, but many Nordic teams have been there the last years.

What is the NCPC? top

The event itself is organised in a distributed manner. It is physically hosted at many participating universities and colleges. The same problemset is used at all sites. The scores are gathered electronically, and the result is simultaneous local, national and Nordic championships. See for example the final standings from the 2014 contest.

The contest is suitable for programmers of almost all skill levels, from beginner to expert, as the problem set always has both very easy and very difficult problems. There are also separate score tables for the local sites, national level and the entire Nordic contest. This means you can choose on which level you want to compare yourself.

Since 1996, there has been a Swedish national championship (Svenskt Mästerskap i Programmering), and a Norwegian national Championship (Norgesmesterskap i programmering). There has been a Nordic championship since 2002.

All the Nordic locations belong to the Northwestern European region in the ICPC system. The Northwestern Europe Programming Contest (NWERC) is usually held in the middle of November. Universities use the local/national/nordic event as a preliminary for this contest.

The rules for the NCPC are the same as for the ICPC regional contests. In NCPC, you are allowed to bring any printed or handwritten material to the contest. No machine readable media or electronic equipment may be brought.

How do I participate? top

On the web-page for current contest there should be a list of sites hosting the contest. If your university is listed, then simply register through the online registration system before the deadline.

If you want to participate but don't have a complete team of three please contact your local contest director so they can try to help you connect with other people without teams.

If your university is not on the list, you should try to make them host the contest! Maybe you could find a professor teaching programming classes, and make him interested in arranging the contest! It is a great opportunity for inspiring students and showing that programming is fun. If no professor is interested, maybe you could get a PhD student or similar to help.

If you cannot get a local contest, many of the existing sites let students from other schools compete there. Write an e-mail to the contact listed.

Hosting a contest top

We strive to make it as easy as possible for a university to join and hold a contest. Basically, all you need to do is reserve a computer room, download and install the contest software and invite the students. We have a NCPC-Site-HOWTO.

Links top

News clips top

Nordic competitions 2006

Northwestern European Regional Contest 2005

Nordic competitions 2005

World finals 2005

Northwestern European Regional Contest 2004

Nordic competitions 2004

World finals 2004

Northwestern European Regional Contest 2003





Updated: 2020-09-20

Responsible editor: Måns Magnusson

