Welcome to the Melbourne Cup

The Melbourne Cup is an inter-university programming day in Melbourne. Universities send teams, teams solve problems, and every solve moves your university further around the track.

The day

• When: Sunday 18 October. The contest runs from 12pm to 5pm, and the room is open from about 11am to 6pm.
• Teams: two or three people. Come on your own and we will put you in a team on the day.
• Tickets: through Humanitix. The link goes up here when bookings open.

The format

It is uni against uni. Every problem you solve scores points for your university, and the race track on the judge shows who is ahead.

The points are split roughly evenly between the main contest and a set of side challenges:

• standard competitive programming problems
• a heuristic problem, where better answers score more
• mini problems, such as writing a solution in a language we pick
• broken code, where you find the input that makes our solution fail
• stalls with mini games worth points on the day

We are also planning some betting on the day. You might stake points on how confident you are in an answer before you submit it, and each club will send a representative into a mini contest that teams can bet on.

Prizes

Cash prizes go to individuals and teams. The winning university gets the title.

Food

Lunch is catered, with afternoon tea and snacks later in the day.

Who runs it

UMCPC, MAPS and MATRIX run the day together.

Details may change as we finalise them. This post will be updated.