BAPC 2021 Call for Problems

The next BAPC and preliminaries are currently planned to be in fall 2021 and are organized by VU Amsterdam. This is the Call for Problems for the jury responsible for the problem set for both these contests.

The deadline for submitting problems to this CfP is March 14th 2021.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the jury on the #cfp channel in the BAPC organisation slack which can be joined here with token I heart Benelux.

While we encourage you to submit a problem through this CfP, it is also possible to join the jury without submitting a problem. Please do submit a zip containing an author.md file explaining your experience in this case.
We also encourage you to submit problems even if you won't be able to join the jury.

Problems from previous years can be found on kattis and here.

If your problem is not selected for the final set, you may retract it and use it for another contest instead.

Expectations when joining the jury

If you join the jury, you will become responsible for one or two problems. You might not be the owner of your own submitted problems, but we try to match owners to problems based on preference and difficulty.

This means that you will have to:

Write a problem statement.
Solve the problem.
Think of almost-correct solutions that fail in non obvious ways (missing edge cases, slow on some types of input; . . .).
Create test data against these WA/TLE solutions.

Typically most of the time working on a problem is spent thinking of more tricky approaches to the problem and either coding them as AC submissions or breaking them using more test data.

Most work will happen over summer: there will be a 2 month 'sprint' with a weekly meeting and deadlines (barring vacations). During this period, the expected work load is 4 to 8 hours a week.

Of course, it is also fine to be ahead of this schedule and fully prepare a problem before summer.

Furthermore, you are expected to be present at both the preliminaries and main contest.

Submission format

When submitting a problem we require at least the following:

problem_statement/problem.en.{md,tex} A markdown or (preferably) latex file containing the problem statement, together with an input and output specification. (Although permitted, you do not need to write a story with the problem yet, as stories tend to be rewritten anyway.)
A readme.md file containing a summary of the problem, an analysis and description of the solution, and the estimated difficulty.
An author.md file containing your name, email address, and relevant experience.
A few (non-trivial) samples for input and output.
At least one correct solution.

A sample problem in this format can be downloaded in this zip.

In case you would already like to add more submissions and test data to your problem and test these submissions, you may want to use BAPCtools or problemtools for development.

Submission form

Submit a single zip file where all files are in a top-level directory named after your problem. (E.g. the zip linked above.) On linux, such a zip can be created with the command
```
  zip -r problem.zip <problem_directory>
```
Please submit one problem at a time.