Regulations

Eligibility

The official participating countries are the North African nations, namely: Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. The organizing country reserves the right to invite additional countries as guest participants.

Delegations

Each eligible country shall be represented by their respective International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) delegation.

Contestants

Each participating country may be represented by a maximum of six contestants. All contestants must meet the eligibility criteria for participation in the IOI in the same year.

Format

The contest will be conducted online within a single day. It will comprise four tasks, which are not necessarily ordered by difficulty.

The only accepted programming language is C++.

The official languages for the contest are English, French, and Arabic. Participating countries may translate the contest materials into their preferred language or dialect.

The duration of the contest will be four hours, and it will be hosted on a Contest Management System (CMS) instance.

Contestants may submit solutions multiple times for each task, in accordance with IOI rules.

Environment

Contestants are permitted to use their own computers, provided they do not utilize pre-written code or access any form of documentation, except for the official C++ reference.

During the contest, contestants are prohibited from communicating or interacting with other individuals or devices, except for submitting questions through the CMS interface or in cases of force majeure.

Contestants are allowed to use standard writing instruments, such as pens or pencils, along with blank sheets of paper for note-taking. These materials must not be shared or displayed to other contestants.

Contestants may consume food and beverages during the contest.

Countries are strongly encouraged to establish an in-person examination center within their respective nations, where the entire team can take the contest under supervised conditions. If such an arrangement is not feasible, each contestant is required to share their screen in a private call through an online meeting platform (e.g., Zoom, Google Meet, Discord, etc.) under the supervision of an assigned organizer.

Disqualification

Any violation of the contest rules will result in the immediate disqualification of the contestant. If the violation is initiated by the team leader, deputy leader, guest, or team proctor, the entire team will be disqualified. Contestants or teams exhibiting unacceptable behavior or repeated non-compliance with the rules may be barred from participating in future contests.

Tasks

The tasks are designed to be solved using computer programming algorithms, adhering to the official IOI syllabus. Each contestant’s solution for a task must consist of a single source code file.

Feedback

Contestants will receive feedback for each task submission, which may include the following outcomes:

  • Accepted (AC): The submitted code constitutes a valid solution for the task.
  • Runtime Error (RE): The submitted code resulted in a program that crashed during evaluation.
  • Time Limit Exceeded (TLE): The program generated by the code exceeded the allowed runtime for at least one evaluation test.
  • Wrong Answer (WA): The program generated by the code produced an incorrect result for at least one evaluation test.

Contestants may submit additional questions through the CMS platform or directly to the proctors. Questions must be phrased in a manner that allows for a "yes" or "no" response. Acceptable questions include requests for task clarification or non-task-related matters (e.g., technical issues, restroom breaks, or food requests). However, contestants may not request hints or guidance regarding the tasks or programming. Contest organizers may issue announcements during the contest via the CMS platform. It is the responsibility of the contestant to monitor and read these announcements.

Grading

Each fully solved task will award the contestant 100 points. There are no penalties for incorrect submissions.

Subtasks

Tasks may include subtasks, which are worth fewer than 100 points. For each task, the maximum score obtained for each subtask will be aggregated. The total maximum score for a task, when combining the scores of all subtasks, is 100 points.