Canadian computing competition
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The Canadian Computing Competition (CCC) is a national programming competition for secondary school students in Canada. Sponsored by Sun Microsystems and the University of Waterloo, the CCC takes place once a year. Stage 1 is a written at high schools and can be written in the programming language of the students' choice, with only a few, such as Maple and Mathematica, disallowed. There are two levels of problems presented, Junior and Senior. The contestants have three hours to solve five problems for each level. The top 20 students in the Senior division are invited to University of Waterloo to participate in Stage 2. In Stage 2 students are restricted to languages permitted at the IOI, which currently includes only C, C++ and Pascal. The top 4 students at Stage 2 are selected for the Canadian IOI team.
In addition, the top two students (for both Junior and Senior) of each region recieves a plaque and a $100. The regions are West (BC to Manitoba), Ontario North and East, Metro, Ontario Central and West, and Quebec and Alantic.
The questions in the CCC are algorithmic in nature, designed to test a student's ability to design and code algorithms rather than their ability knowing APIs (such as Swing or AWT). Problems increase greatly in difficulty, where the last question is an IOI level problem. They generally have memory, time or stack constraints (especially in recursion) forcing the programmer to find a more efficient solution to the problem. Usually, most problems contain a hidden loophole that would allows certain inputs to crash the program or produce incorrect results.
