2024 February Contest -- Final Results

The 2024 February contest featured algorithmic programming problems covering a wide range of techniques and levels of difficulty.

A total of 7890 participants submitted at least one solution, hailing from 100+ different countries. Of these, 3693 were from the USA, with high representation also from China, Canada, Korea, Romania, Malaysia, India, and Singapore.

In total, there were 19289 graded submissions, broken down by language as follows:

10346 C++17
 3183 C++11
 2949 Python-3.6.9
 2687 Java
   92 C
   32 Python-2.7.17

Below are the detailed results for each of the platinum, gold, silver, and bronze contests. You will also find solutions and test data for each problem, and by clicking on any problem you can practice re-submitting solutions in "analysis mode". If you are logged in, you will also see your own specific results below alongside the contest(s) you took.

USACO 2024 February Contest, Platinum

The platinum division had 520 total participants, of whom 385 were pre-college students. Results for top scorers are here. Congratulations to all of the top participants for their excellent results!

1

Lazy Cow
View problem  |   Test data   |   Solution

2

Minimum Sum of Maximums
View problem  |   Test data   |   Solution

3

Infinite Adventure
View problem  |   Test data   |   Solution

USACO 2024 February Contest, Gold

The gold division had 934 total participants, of whom 682 were pre-college students. All competitors who scored 800 or higher on this contest are automatically promoted to the platinum division. Detailed results for all those promoted are here.

1

Bessla Motors
View problem  |   Test data   |   Solution

2

Milk Exchange
View problem  |   Test data   |   Solution

3

Quantum Moochanics
View problem  |   Test data   |   Solution

USACO 2024 February Contest, Silver

The silver division had 4139 total participants, of whom 3207 were pre-college students. All competitors who scored 750 or higher on this contest are automatically promoted to the gold division.

1

Target Practice II
View problem  |   Test data   |   Solution

2

Test Tubes
View problem  |   Test data   |   Solution

3

Moorbles
View problem  |   Test data   |   Solution

USACO 2024 February Contest, Bronze

The bronze division had 5531 total participants, of whom 4254 were pre-college students. All competitors who scored 750 or higher on this contest are automatically promoted to the silver division.

1

Palindrome Game
View problem  |   Test data   |   Solution

2

Milk Exchange
View problem  |   Test data   |   Solution

3

Maximizing Productivity
View problem  |   Test data   |   Solution

Final Remarks

After the challenges we saw in the January contest, it was nice to see a contest that ran much more smoothly from an operational point of view, due in part to recent and ongoing improvements in our contest infrastructure. As we near the end of the 2023-2024 contest season, we continue to see strong performance and good numbers of promotions in all divisions.

For those not yet promoted, remember that the more practice you get, the better your algorithmic coding skills will become -- please keep at it! USACO contests are designed to challenge even the very best students, and it can take a good deal of hard work to excel at them (from the results, the platinum-level problem lineup in this contest looked particularly challenging!). To help you fix any bugs in your code, you can now re-submit your solutions and get feedback from the judging server using "analysis mode".

A large number of people contribute towards the quality and success of USACO contests. Those who helped with this contest include Brandon Wang, Claire Zhang, Benjamin Qi, Alexander Wei, Chongtian Ma, Alex Liang, Patrick Deng, Aryansh Shrivastava, Suhas Nagar, Nick Wu, Alex Fan, Anand John, Andi Qu, Richard Qi, Danny Mittal, Benjamin Chen, Jichao Qian, and Nathan Wang. Thanks also to our translators and to Clemson CCIT for providing our contest infrastructure. Finally, we are grateful to the USACO sponsors for their generous support: Citadel, Ansatz, X-Camp, TwoSigma, VPlanet Coding, EasyFunCoding, Orijtech, and Jump Trading.

We look forward to seeing everyone again for the 2024 US Open contest, our final contest of the season.

Happy coding!

- Brian Dean ([email protected])
Professor and Director, School of Computing, Clemson University
Director, USACO