Hi everyone Welcome back to school! It has been a slightly cold August, so I suppose you have all spent it coding, right? If not the season of programming contests is starting, so here's your chance! On saturday 4th of October we have the annual Danish Championships in Programming (DM). The event is sponsored by Netcompany and arranged jointly by the Computer Science department and Netcompany. As is tradition, there will be lunch, snacks, cake, soda, fruit, etc during the competition. After the competition we will have an award ceremony and then we go through the exercises from the contest. While we go through the exercises there will be pizza, sodas, and beer. More about the contest below. There will be some practice sessions on 9th and 16th of September from 16.00-18.00 in Zuse, read below for more details. For those interested in trying out for NWERC, we will have a qualification competition in Zuse on Sunday the 27th of September from 10-16, these details can also be found below. Everyone is of course welcome to participate for the practice :-) ** What is a programming competition? ** You participate as a team with 2-3 people. Your team has one computer where you collaborate to solve exercises/problems. Solving a problem means writing a program that reads input (from standard in), then it does some computation and produces an output which it writes to standard out. Your source code is then uploaded to a judge which will either accept or reject based on the correctness of your program. The problems are usually algorithmic in nature and the allowed programming languages are Java, C and C++ (if we are lucky they may extend the language to also cover scripting languages such as python/ruby etc.). The contest takes 5 hours. During this time you are only allowed to access the internet for submitting your code to the judge and reading the documentation for your programming language. If you want to gain experience with this show up to one of the practice sessions (see below) ** Pratical info about DM ** The contest takes place at several locations, in particular we have a local site which is the Zuse building. The event starts at approximately 10.00 in Zuse, where you show up and find a computer (there will be one set up for your team). At 10.30 Netcompany will give you a warm welcome and some tips & tricks for the contest will follow. The contest starts at 11.00 and ends at 16.00. After the contest we will have an award ceremony and we go through the solutions to the problems (if we figured them out!). While we go through the problems there will be pizza, beer, soda, etc. ** How do you sign up for DM? ** On this page: http://www.netcompany.com/dm there is a link to a sign up page. *Remember* to also send an email to jasn@cs.au.dk saying how many people are on your team (because I need to confirm you in the system once we get to that point). If you would like to participate, but you do not have a team, send me an email and I will try to match you up with others in the same situation. ** Important $$$ profit! ** The winning team of the danish championships wins a check for 10.000 kr, but remember there is also a site in Copenhagen. Let's see if we can keep the check on the mainland! We won it two years ago but lost it last year. It is up to you to make us proud! :-) Usually the money is spent on the trip to NWERC, which is another programming competition for the Northwestern European region (http://nwerc.eu) in November. It is, however, entirely up to the team how to spend their prize. ** NWERC and qualification ** The University usually sends one/two team(s) to NWERC. To decide who gets to go, we arrange a qualification round where you participate alone. The top 3-6 people gets to go, sponsored by the university. The qualification round takes place in Zuse the 27th of September from 11-16. During the contest there will be pizza and sodas. This is also an opportunity to practice before the Danish Championships, and particpation for this event is highly recommended :-). How do you sign up? You send me an email saying you would like to participate. Note that this is a *solo* competition. ** Practice Sessions ** If this has piqued your interest, then on Tuesday the 9th and 17th of September from 15.15-18.00 there will be practice sessions in Zuse. During a practice session we solve some problems and talk about them. This is a beginner friendly environment and everyone is very welcome to join! :-) If you happen to have classes in the begining, feel free to show up late, it is quite informal. ** Questions ** Feel free to contact me ( jasn@cs.au.dk ) with any questions you have regarding anything about the programming contests! Best, Jesper