News

More Rules

2 years, 1 month ago

At the request of some of the contestants, we wanted to make an explicit set of rules. Besides the one we previously announced about brute force, we think these are pretty self-explanatory, but it’s good to keep them out in the open:

  • Don’t share information about problems to teams that haven’t started their timer. Don’t create multiple teams or otherwise circumvent the timer. You should see the problems for the first time when you open your team’s timer, and you shouldn’t be on more than one team.

  • Don’t share flags or talk about the problems with other teams at all. If you have a question about the problems, talk to the staff members and administrators.

  • Don’t ask for help, on the Internet or in person, to anyone not on your team about any of the problems.

  • As clarified earlier, don’t brute-force the flags to any of the problems.

These aren’t set in stone, and as always the PACTF staff has full discretion: don’t take this list as excluding anything we forgot. This should help any teams that for some reason thought any of this stuff was allowed. Note that the penalty for any of these is probably complete disqualification, and in egregious cases we’ll contact your school as well. Thank you for your cooperation, and hope you’re enjoying PACTF 2019!

Rules Clarification

2 years, 1 month ago

A quick clarification to the rules: brute-forcing the flags is not allowed, and can result in disqualification. We will not be retroactively applying this to any teams that brute-forced problems before this announcement, because this rule was never clearly elucidated. This does not mean that teams cannot try multiple answers or that there is a limit on submissions: trying 10 flags isn’t an issue, but trying 1000 is. If you have any questions, feel free to contact a staff member on Discord.

Enigmatic Updated Again

2 years, 1 month ago
This announcement affects the following problems: Enigmatic

Enigmatic has been updated once again due to communications error between staff members. It is now fixed, and any teams that have previously found the problem unsolvable should be able to do it now. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may caused any of our contestants, one again.

Enigmatic Updated

2 years, 1 month ago
This announcement affects the following problems: Enigmatic

Enigmatic has been updated due to a misconfiguration in the problem file. It is now fixed, and any teams that previously found the problem intractable should be able to return to it now. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused any of our contestants.