MCC Information

• Contest Format
  • Contest Structure
  • Problem Format
    • Structure
    • Submission
    • Sample Problem
• Contest Regulations
• Categories
• Awards and Certificates
• Beyond MCC
• FAQs
  • If I participate, will I always get a certificate?
  • My program outputs the correct answer for the sample input, why is my submission for other inputs incorrect?
  • The input is too large, it takes too long to paste the input into the terminal
  • The output is too large, the terminal cuts the output off
  • My computer is not fast enough, the input is too large
  • If the answer is 2 3, will the outputs differing only in whitespace be accepted (e.g. _2___3__, where _ are spaces)?
  • If the answer is 2 3000, will the outputs 2,3000, 2-3000, 2.0 3.0, or 2 3e3 be accepted?

Contest Format

Contest Structure

• MCC will be held on SimpleCMS (our in-house contest system!).
• Participants will attempt to solve 4–6 problems within a 48-hour window.
  • They may attempt the problems anytime during the entire two-day window.
• Only the final score will be used for ranking.
  • Incorrect answers and submission time will not affect your ranking.
• Participants may work on the contest anywhere, including at home.

Problem Format

Structure

• Each problem consists of a statement describing the problem and several inputs.
• The problem statements will be available in both English and Bahasa Malaysia.
• The inputs are unique to each participant.
• For each input, participants are required to submit an output (by typing/pasting the output into a text box) that satisfies the statement and input.
• The more challenging tasks will likely require programming knowledge.
  • For beginners, Python is recommended. Once you know how to program in a certain language, the skill can be easily transferred to other languages.
  • For experienced ones, C++ is recommended as it is the only language supported in the later rounds (see the Beyond MCC section).

Submission

• Each input has a limit on number of submissions (independent of other inputs) to prevent answer spamming.
• Full score for a task will be awarded if the output submitted is correct, zero score will be awarded otherwise.
• Participants will know whether their submission is correct immediately after it is made.
• Participants will not need to upload code during the contest (if they did not use code).
  • As long as they can produce the correct output, they can use any programming language or method (even solving by hand for small inputs).
  • However, if participants wrote code to solve problems, they must save their code to be submitted for the exit survey.

Sample Problem

Given a list of numbers a_1, a_2, ..., a_n. Output the sum of all numbers.

Input format:

n
a_1 a_2 ... a_n

Output format:

Output the sum of all numbers on one line.

Sample input:

100
22 39 68 90 22 53 80 36 16 44 48 29 13 24 51 69 99 65 58 41 68 57 66 5 44 10 23 1 24 64 29 85 6 22 51 14 98 93 71 77 100 92 62 69 76 83 19 68 75 40 16 20 47 95 60 71 34 11 80 90 14 39 69 71 18 64 63 89 57 88 52 2 71 2 71 20 12 49 97 33 43 7 30 37 8 83 9 68 96 72 99 21 53 68 25 71 2 31 65 69

Sample output:

5021

Past MCC problems are available here.

Contest Regulations

• During the competition, participants are allowed to:
  • Use any printed/online resources and tutorials.
• During the competition, participants are not allowed to:
  • Use AI or Large Language Model (LLM) systems, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or GitHub Copilot.
  • Discuss the problems with others.
  • Ask for help from others, including on online forums.
  • Provide solutions online.
• Participants must notify the organisers (mcc [at] ioimalaysia [dot] org) immediately if they become aware of other participants cheating.

Categories

There are four categories in MCC. Contestants should join the first category that applies to them:

• Bongsu / Junior – 15 years old or below (based on birth year)
• Muda / Intermediate – 17 years old or below (based on birth year)
• Sulung / Senior – 19 years old or below (born on 1 July and later)
• Open – otherwise

The Open category is open to everyone.

The Junior, Intermediate, and Senior categories are only open to those who are eligible for IOI in the following year (with some conditions). Specifically, they are open to those who:

• are either studying in Malaysia or are a Malaysian citizen studying abroad; AND
• are enrolled in a school at a level of secondary education or lower; AND
• are not enrolled in a degree programme at a tertiary education institution with a half-time or greater load; AND
• are born on or after 1 July in year $(\text{MCC year} - 19)$ (i.e. not older than 19 years old on 1 July).

In particular:

• The following groups are eligible for the Junior/Intermediate/Senior categories:
  • Students in a pre-university program (e.g. Foundation, A-levels, IB, Diploma).
  • Non-Malaysian students studying in Malaysia.
  • Malaysian students studying abroad.
  • Homeschooled students.
• Primary school students are eligible for the Junior category.

See the IOI regulations for eligibility information (section S2.5 as of writing).

Only participants in the Junior, Intermediate, and Senior categories are eligible for IOI selection. The organisers reserve the right to make the final decision on IOI eligibility. Eligibility for IOI implies eligibility for MCC, but not vice versa.

Awards and Certificates

There will be Gold, Silver, and Bronze awards for each category. All contestants will work on the same problems, but award cutoffs will be different for each category.

All participants who made at least one submission (which may be incorrect) will receive a participation certificate (in addition to the award if they receive one).

We will be giving out digital certificates instead of physical ones.

Beyond MCC

MCC is the preliminary selection process of a year-long program to identify and train the top computing talents in Malaysian schools for the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and other informatics competitions (e.g. APIO).

Top scorers in MCC will be:

• Invited to a training camp introducing algorithms and algorithmic thinking, tentatively held around December.
• Invited to the Malaysian Computing Olympiad (MCO), a programming competition tentatively held around April next year.

The top scorers in MCO will be invited to:

• Intensive training camps conducted by experienced Olympiad participants;
• IOI team selection tests; and
• Asia-Pacific Informatics Olympiad (APIO), an annual online contest among countries in the Pacific Rim region.

After the training camps and selection tests, four students will be selected to represent Malaysia in the IOI. We may also select students to represent Malaysia in more informatics competitions (e.g. European Girls’ Olympiad in Informatics (EGOI) in 2025).

FAQs

If I participate, will I always get a certificate?

Yes, but you must make at least one submission (which may be incorrect).

Each participant that made a submission will receive a participation certificate regardless of performance. Each award winner will also receive an award certificate in addition to the participation certificate.

My program outputs the correct answer for the sample input, why is my submission for other inputs incorrect?

Check your logic and code – your program might work for the sample input, but not for the other test cases.

The input is too large, it takes too long to paste the input into the terminal

You should paste the input into a file and have your code read from it. See the next question for more details.

If it still takes too long, try using the built-in text editor of your computer (instead of, for example, VS Code):

• Windows: Notepad
• MacOS: TextEdit

The output is too large, the terminal cuts the output off

You should output into a file and copy the file contents. If you run [command] in the terminal to run your code and your code outputs to standard output, you can do [command] > output.txt to write to output.txt.

If you want to programmatically handle file input/output:

In C/C++, a short way to read from and write to a file is:

freopen("input.txt", "r", stdin);
freopen("output.txt", "w", stdout);

In Python, you can do

with open('input.txt', "r", encoding="utf-8") as f:
  ...
with open('output.txt', "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
  f.write("output")

My computer is not fast enough, the input is too large

If pasting the input is slow, see two questions before this.

Otherwise, all inputs are solvable by an ordinary computer in ~10 seconds. The inputs are intentionally large to force you to find an efficient algorithm.

Notably, we verify that all problems are solvable on https://studio.firebase.google.com/. You can import the repo https://github.com/veehz/ioi-nix-setup as a start.

Most problems should also be solvable on https://ide.usaco.guide except some problems may take a bit more than 5s and some inputs are too large to be uploaded to the site.

If the answer is 2 3, will the outputs differing only in whitespace be accepted (e.g. _2___3__, where _ are spaces)?

To be lenient, we often ignore whitespace differences (e.g. spaces, newlines). However, we do not guarantee that whitespace differences are always ignored.

If the answer is 2 3000, will the outputs 2,3000, 2-3000, 2.0 3.0, or 2 3e3 be accepted?

No. Please follow the specified output format correctly. Unless otherwise specified, floating point numbers (decimal or scientific notation) are not accepted when integers are expected.