ACM SIGMOD 2016 Programming Contest

News

Jul 10, 2016	As announced at the SIGMOD conference, we are pleased to congratulate overall contest winners H_minor_free (University of Tokyo) and runners up uoa_team (University of Athens).
April 18, 2016	Thanks to all of the teams that participated this year, and congratulations to the five finalists!
April 16, 2016	Starting on Monday April 18th, the contest dashboard will no longer be available.
April 7, 2016	Contest submissions are now closed. Thanks to all of the participating teams! We'll announce the finalists by April 30th, at the latest.
March 18, 2016	The new XX-Large test is now in place, and the original Large test is gone. All existing submissions will show an XX-Large test score of 300 plus their time on the old Large test (to preserve the ranking of those submissions). All new submissions will run against the XX-Large test, and will show their actual run-times. Good luck!
March 17, 2016	On Friday (March 18th), we are planning to eliminate the current Large test and replace it with a new XX-Large test. Existing submissions will not be re-tested against the new XX-Large test. Instead, we will preserve their relative rankings in much the same way that we did when we introduced the X-Large test. If you'd like your current code to be tested against the XX-Large case, re-submit it after the new test has gone live. We are not planning any further changes to the test cases before the end of the contest.
March 16, 2016	We're happy to announce in increase in the prize for this year's contest. Instead of a $5,000 prize for the winning team, we will have a $7,000 prize for the winning team plus a $3,000 dollar prize for the runner-up. Thanks to our generous sponsor for this boost.
February 29, 2016	The new xlarge test case is now live.
February 27, 2016	We are planning to introduce a new "xlarge" test case early next week. Between now and then you may see some changes to the dashboard and leaderboard. We will make another announcement when the new test is live. Existing submissions will not be re-tested against the new xlarge case. Instead, we will preserve their relative rankings by treating them as if they had passed the new test in the maximum allowed time. Once the new test is live, all subsequent submissions will be tested against it. If you'd like your current code to be tested against the xlarge case, just re-submit it after the new test has gone live. When we introduce the new test, we will also be lowering the testing time limits for the three existing tests to 2 minutes. This means that our reference implementation will no longer pass the tests. Depending on how the contest goes, we may eventually replace one or more of the current tests with new, larger tests. If we do this, we will provide advance notice of the change.
February 21, 2016	Team registration, the dashboard, and the leaderboard are now available.
February 16, 2016	Contest is launched! The task description and a reference implementation are now available. Team registration should start next week.

Contest Overview

Student teams from degree-granting institutions are invited to compete in the annual SIGMOD programming contest. This year, the subject of the contest is shortest-path queries over dynamic graphs. The winning team will be awarded a prize of USD $7,000, and there will be an additional prize of USD $3,000 for the runner-up. Teams' submissions will be judged on their overall performance on a supplied workload. One member of each of the top 5 teams will receive a travel grant to attend SIGMOD 2016 in San Francisco, California.

This year's contest is brought to you by the Data Systems Group at the University of Waterloo.

Task Overview

The shortest path problem is the problem of finding a path between two vertices in a graph, such that the sum of the weights of the path's edges is minimized. For this year's contest, the task is to answer, as efficiently as possible, shortest path queries on a changing graph. We will provide an initial graph which you may process and index in any way you deem necessary. Once this is done, we will begin issuing a workload consisting of a series of shortest path queries and graph updates (insertions or deletions of nodes and edges). The task is to answer the queries correctly and as quickly as possible. In answering each query, all graph updates preceding the query must be taken into account.

More details about this year's problem can be found on the task page

Important Dates

February 16, 2016	Contest requirements specification and test data available.
February 21, 2016	Team registration begins. Leaderboard available.
23:59 UTC, April 7, 2016	Final submission deadline.
April 30, 2016	Finalists notified.
June 26 2016	SIGMOD 2016 Conference begins.

Sponsor

Prize money for the winning team is donated by Microsoft.

Contacts

Ask technical questions and stay up to date by joining the SIGMOD 2016 Contest Google Group.
For non-technical questions, please e-mail sigmod16contest@cs.uwaterloo.ca.