United States of America Computing Olympiad

The United States Computing Olympiad includes a series of seven internet programming contests and a training camp, used to eventually choose the team that will represent the US in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI).

Internet Competitions

There are four Internet Competitions held each year and USACO's flagship contest, the US Open, which tests the programmer's ability to write correct programs, with restrictions on runtime and memory usage.

These competitions have different divisions: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum.

Contests take place each month from December through March. These contests are generally 3-4 problems lasting 4 hours. Competitors may participate at any time over a weekend for four hours as long as those hours are continuous. The full score is 1000, with each problem having equal weight in the score. Each problem has at least 10-16 test cases. Every test case has equal weight within the problem. For each test case correct, you receive the points for the test case. Programs get 4 seconds per test case for Java and Python, and 2 seconds for other languages. Each test case will give feedback on how well your program did. \* - Correct. The time and memory space used will be shown. x - Incorrect ! - Run-time error or memory limit exceeded m - missing output file

Anyone who didn't take the contest before is put in the bronze division. Anyone who scores above the promotion line gets promoted to the next division for the next contest. Cutoff lines generally range from 600 to 800. Anyone who gets a perfect score on a contest gets an in-contest promotion, which means that the contestant is able to take the next division on the same weekend.

Training Camp

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