Contest Format & Rules

Every ANCO contest, just like USACO contests, will be 4 hours in length consisting of 3 competitive programming questions. Topics that these questions will cover can be found here. A contestant may start their ANCO contest any time during a certain contest's contest window, and their 4-hour timer will begin counting down as soon as the contest begins.

Top scorers of every ANCO contest will be honored in the Leaderboards.

As with all such contests, there must be rules. Here are the rules for ANCO:

• Absolutely NO usage of ANY generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, etc.) during the contest to help you write code. THE ANCO TEAM WILL BE MANUALLY REVIEWING EVERYONE'S SUBMISSIONS AFTER EVERY CONTEST TO DETECT FOR AI USAGE, so don't use AI, as nothing will slip by!
• The contest must be completed in one contiguous 4-hour session.
• This contest is meant to be completed individually. Thus, work alone, and do not work in a team.
• Do not submit code that will be malicious to ANCO's judge (grading software).
• Per USACO rules, all code submitted must be less than 100,000 bytes in size, and all code submitted must use less than 256MB in memory. (If you receive a runtime error as a verdict from the ANCO judge when you don't have a runtime error, your submission may have violated the two rules above!)
• Also per USACO rules, programs must not stop and wait for keypresses. Submission of a program that waits for a keypress will result in a TLE (time limit error) and thus a wrong answer.
• Do not discuss any of the contest problems for a certain contest until the contest window has expired.