Objectives - This class' success will be directly proportional to the effort put into it by the students of the class. You are the professor for this one. The saying goes:

when you are explained the information, you learn it;
when you apply the information, you understand it;
when you teach it, you master it.

This class will not only prepare you for the ACM ICPC, but will give you a taste of that mastery.

Structure - The work for this class will be broken into two components:

• Students must complete homeworks assigned to them pertaining to the techniques being practiced in class. Most of these problems will be drawn from repositories of past problems. Students must interact in class, and participate. Bring your creativity!
• Students will alternate teaching the techniques and ideas each week. This will include
  1. First week: 1.25 hours of introducing the material, and doing sample problems. Assign homework for the week.
  2. Over the course of the week: mediate discussion on the mailing list, and reviewing homework submissions to understand where other students had issues.
  3. Second week: 0.75 hours of homework discussion to follow up and take the material further.

Prerequisites:

• A deep desire to become a better coder. Required.
• Some programming experience.

Responsibilities - Students must

1. Attend all classes unless you are sick or there is an emergency.
2. Interact, ask questions, and generally participate in class discussions.
3. Complete assigned homework, and interact on the mailing list.
4. Take their teaching responsibilities very seriously (see course structure).

Homework is due by 11:59pm on Thursdays, unless otherwise indicated. Submit via blackboard.

Official ACM ICPC Website:
http://cm.baylor.edu/welcome.icpc

Official ACM ICPC Website for the Mid-Atlantic region:
http://www.radford.edu/acm/midatl/index.html

Art of Programming Contest:
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~rhyspj/fall07cs197/ArtOfProgrammingContestBook.pdf

Some old problems:
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~gogo/acm/ProblemSets/index.html

Programming Challenges:
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~skiena/392/programs/

Programming competition resources
http://community.topcoder.com/tc (especially see "Tutorials")
http://code.google.com/codejam
http://www.codechef.com/

Previous ICPC class:
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~rhyspj/fall07cs197/cs197.html

Problem sets:
http://www.ntnu.edu.tw/acm/ProblemSetArchive.html
http://livearchive.onlinejudge.org/

Events are in bold. Note that this schedule is subject to change.

Date	Who	Topic
9/2	Parmer and Price Jones	Introduction and class structure
9/9	Andrew Hirsch	programming contest environment (file/input I/O, http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~gogo/acm/cheats.html, competition HOWTO/techniques), binary search discussion (actual implementation, variable overflow, edge cases), complexity (big Oh), greedy algorithms
9/16	Nate Scott (setup environment)	Mock Competition
9/23	???	backtracking algorithms
9/30	???	graph basics, DFS/BFS, Dijkstra, Floyd-Warshall, Mazes
10/7	???	Mock Competition
10/14	???	geometry
10/21	???	dynamic programming
10/28	???	Mock Competition
11/4	???	???
11/5		Competition!!!
,..		Nationals!!!
,..		World domination!!!

Grades will be assigned with the following proportions:

Homeworks: 33%
Attendance and Participation: 33%
Teaching: 34%

Just as you can do a google search for code online, it is trivial for us to do the same. We have caught numerous people cheating in the past in this way. If you feel pressured about an assignment, please come see me instead of cheating.

This course is about collaboration! You should talk actively about the homeworks, but do not share code with each other unless explicitly allowed to. This policy will be strictly enforced. If you're having significant trouble with an assignment, please contact me.

Academic Integrity Policy
Credit: I'd like to thank Prof. Narahari for the first versions of this academic honesty policy.