Today I am very glad to let the TI-Concours 2016 begin !



What is the TI-Concours ?

Created in 2011, the TI-Concours is a programming contest on TI calculators. Initially made for high school students who had a z80 calculator, he gradually extended to all categories of age, and other platforms and languages.
Organized four years in a row, it quickly became a major contest, with participants from several different communities on the net.
Unfortunately canceled in 2015, I am really happy to organize a fifth edition, which I hope will be full of success.

How the contest will run

This year, there are two categories :

1st category : z80 and ez80 TI-Basic.
2nd category : ez80 Asm / C ez80 and Nspire Basic/Lua.

From January 11th, you will have four weeks to enter the qualification round. There will be several questions, which will all consist in making a program on your calculator. Subjects are made to be entertaining, so that you may have fun in participating and improving yourself at the same time.

The questions' difficulty is globally increasing. It is not necessary to do everything, and for that reason I advise you to send us what you have done whatever your degree of progress.

After this qualification round, the best participants will be selected for the final, which will be held in the beginning of March. These people will be given another subject, which will be harder. The time limit will also be strict : only 3 hours and 30 minutes !

At the end, there will be a ranking : you can get at most 100 points for the qualification round, 400 points for the final.
You may participate in both categories.

Prizes

Here are the prizes for both categories :

• 1st prize : 1 TI-83 Premium CE + 2 TI-Planet stickers + TI-Planet Premium account;
  
• 2nd prize : 1 TI-82 Advanced + 1 TI-Planet sticker + TI-Planet Premium account;
  
• 3rd prize : TI-Planet Premium account.

Another TI-Planet Premium account will be given to the qualifications' winners, in case they wouldn't be on the podium.

Subjects

Qualifications : 1st category
Qualifications : 2nd category
In the first category, the document was updated on January 12th, at 7:53 P.M.

Good luck to everyone !

Note : if there are mistakes, and especially english mistakes, please tell me quickly.

For the people who don't know what a TI-Planet Premium account is and don't speak French: Lionel explained that it is an account without advertisements, and with which you can use TI-Planet's image and PDF and program conversion tools without limits. Good luck to everyone entering the contest! Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious (perhaps it's in the downloads linked?): what exactly is the topic of the contest? A few years ago, it was to make a Tic-Tac-Toe / Morpion game, for instance.

Said limits on the image + PDF conversion tools aren't hit by most users in practice, but necessary for preserving QoS (fairness among users) and disk space.
~261K conversion jobs were triggered in 2015, i.e. just shy of a job every couple minutes on average, and most of those jobs involve megabytes of data... which translates to hundreds of gigabytes of persistent data every year, if no purging were ever done for anyone. That's not sustainable

Actually, the qualification round has changed a little bit compared to previous contests. It does not consist in imposed subjects like before : you have a document with a little story, and some programming questions, and the aim is to solve as much problems as you can. It's very similar to the final round that we had before.

This seems very interesting, and if I've some free time, I will participate in this contest! Is it necessary to have a TI-Planet account?

Indeed! Do I need a TI-Planet account? And if I do, is there a English version of the TI-Planet page? Because I can't speak French to save my life.

No, you don't need a TI-Planet account. And you can now download directly the files in english from this topic.

I have a question about the first contest, what if there is more than one room in the matrix, for example, one is in the middle surrounded by walls, while another has access to the outside, what happens in this case? Does the program have to output a list? Is this not going to be the case, ever?
To make myself super clear, I am suggesting we have something like this:
[[1,1,1,1,1,1,1]
[ 1,1,0,0,1,1,1]
[ 0,0,1,0,0,0,1]
[ 1,1,1,1,1,1,1]]
What does the program have to output in S?

Therefore, you will never get such a matrix.

I do have some questions too!
At #2, may we assume N is odd, so not 2?
At #3, I don't understand the order. With 8 participants, why is it {1,8,5,4,3,6,7,2} and not something like {1,8,2,7,3,6,4,5}?

#2 No.
#3 It's because it has to be {1,4,3,2} on the next round (assuming stronger participants win).

So for #3, with 8 participants, is {6,3,7,2,5,4,8,1} good as well?

No, the order does matter, actually.

I still don't get it. Why is it {1,8,5,4...} instead of {1,8,4,5}?

The main reason is that you will have some trouble on question 6 otherwise. I could have chosen another order, but some sports use exactly this knockout table, and that's why I put that one.

I, too, would like quite a bit of clarification on #3. What exactly determines the EXACT order? And can you give an example for 16, and explain it?

For 16 it would be :
1
16
9
8
5
12
13
4
3
14
11
6
7
10
15
2

Try to move from one table to the next one (from 8 to 16 for example).

After fuddling with augment() for a while, I found a 116 byte solution, and will use this in the competition. Thank you.

I finally understand you exactly how to create expand that tables. I have a 79 bytes solution right now

Let's see what people are creating, and how far they are. For me, I've completed the questions until #5, and still working on #6. My bytes in TI-BASIC are:
60 (if my solution is valid), 22, 79, 7 , 64

How about others?