Interested in submitting your tasks? Great! We sincerely thank your contribution to the Universal Cup!
Before submitting, you need to have an account on QOJ and properly protect your password. You should submit all your proposals at https://qoj.ac/proposals. All your task materials will be uploaded using your account, and you will receive notifications and feedback from us within the system only.
The submission deadlines
We have two submission cycles this year. Although we do not place any disadvantages on late proposals, we strongly recommend you submit your tasks as early as possible so we can provide a more detailed review of each of your task proposals.
| Stage |
Submission Deadline |
Decision Notification |
| 1 |
July 1, 2026 |
Late July, 2026 |
| 2 |
August 1, 2026 |
Early September, 2026 |
| 3 |
September 1, 2026 |
Late September, 2026 |
The final deadline to submit your tasks is September 1, 2026. Late submissions might not be reviewed.
Things need to be prepared
After clicking the "New Proposal" button, you will receive a dedicated submission page for your proposal only. If you need to submit multiple tasks, you must create multiple proposals independently.
In the proposal management page, you need to upload your problem statements, a brief editorial, and a list of conflicts. Each text box provides you with a simple Markdown editor (so you can use $\binom{n}{m}$ or **two** to format your task content). All materials you submitted must be written in either English or Chinese.
Problem Statement
The problem statement should contain the core idea of your task proposal. You do not need to come up with a funny background or detailed definitions. You may submit a formal camera-ready statement if available, but it is fine to just write a few sentences to describe what you would like to ask in this task. Be sure to include constraints in the problem statements — it is fine to just have an approximation; you can change them when preparing your tasks if accepted.
Other sections like input format or example explanations are not required, but you may add them if you find they are helpful for the reviewers to understand your task.
If you need to include figures or any auxiliary files, DO NOT STORAGE THEM ON THIRD-PARTY PUBLIC SERVICES! Do not use Google Docs, public image hosting services, or blogs/forums that can be easily visited by other users.
Brief Editorial
A brief editorial is a required component of your task submission. The brief editorial should describe the intended solution to your task, and you may include any alternative or suboptimal solutions in your editorial.
The editorial is used to help the reviewers better understand your proposal. Reviewers are all experienced competitive programmers, so you may utilize any well-known tricks without detailed explanation. You do not need to write every proof of the lemmas you used, but you should keep your editorial informative to the reader.
It is fine if you are not sure your approach will be optimal for this problem. When reviewing your proposals, our reviewers will first come up with their own solutions, and multiple reviewers will work with admitted tasks to see if any improvements could be made for the task.
Furthermore, if your idea comes from a paper or other tasks, you should also list them in the editorial section. You may also list any additional comments in the editorial section.
List of conflicts
Security is the top concern we have in our selection process. You have to list anyone, including non Universal Cup contestants, who knows any parts of your task proposals. BE SURE TO MAKE YOUR CONFLICT LISTS COMPLETE BEFORE SUBMITTING YOUR TASKS.
We understand that your tasks might have been proposed to other competitions, and this is common in the competitive programming community. You are required to report all the trainings/contests/competitions you have submitted your tasks to, no matter online or offline, school trainings or international championship.
You should also list all the platforms you used to store or create your tasks, such as GitHub, Polygon, Libre OJ private tasks, Google Docs, Discord Private Message, etc. This will help us to know the context of your task proposal and evaluate the security of your task proposals.
You have to list everything on your best effort. If you are not sure about any conflicts, just list them. Listing more conflicts will not negatively affect your proposal.
The evaluation process
After finishing all parts of your proposal, you need to make sure that you have switched the status of your proposal to "ready for review". Once you marked ready, we will hide the task content to everyone from the proposal page, so that we could reduce the risk of leaking a proposed task. As such, you will be unable to make any changes to that proposal after clicking ready. If you do need to make any changes after submitting your proposal, you need to send an email to [email protected] with details of your proposals.
Following this, our task reviewing team will begin working with your proposal. Your proposal will only be visible to our task reviewing team and dedicated reviewers. If your proposal is not accepted, we will inform you the list of the people who has reviewed your task, and you may submit any unaccepted proposals to any other competitions.
The Problem Selection Committee (PSC) is responsible for reviewing all submitted tasks. The members of the PSC, including its Chair, are appointed by the Chair of the Scientific Committee (SC).
For the 4th Universal Cup Semifinals, the PSC consists of:
- Qingyu Shi (Chair)
- Bingpei Li
- Jiangqi Dai
- Junlin Ye
- Lingyu Jiang
- Yuhao Du
- Yaohui Zeng
- Yichen Li
- Yanru Guan
- Yaowei Lyu
- Zexu Shi
- Zeyue Wu
- Zhiyuan Ge
- Zixuan Yan
- Zonghan Yang
All admitted contest tasks require approval from the Scientific Committee (SC). Each PSC meeting will be attended by the task reviewers and SC members. Task reviewers and other PSC members are welcome to share their comments and recommendations during the meeting, but the final decision-making authority rests solely with the Scientific Committee.
Q&As
Q: What types of tasks are you accepting?
A: We accept a wide range of task types. We do not have a strict syllabus for our competition, and you may submit tasks on all kinds of topics. Besides classical batch tasks, you can also submit interactive tasks, communication tasks, output-only tasks, or any other innovative task types! Our Technical Committee will coordinate with the Scientific Committee to ensure your task can be properly judged.
Q: Is there any hard limit for judging?
A: The memory limit for a task must not exceed 4 GiB, and we strongly recommend keeping it at 2 GiB whenever possible.
There is no strict upper bound on the input size or time limit. However, we may be unable to use a task if our judging infrastructure cannot provide stable and responsive evaluation for participants. As a general guideline, we recommend that for more approachable problems the total size of all test cases stay within 200 MiB and the time limit within 5 seconds per test case.
Q: Do you accept easier tasks?
A: Sure! In fact, we especially struggled with deciding on the easier part of the problem set when doing previous problem-settings. Creating a great easy task is hard, and we definitely want to hear your ideas.
Q: How many tasks may I submit?
A: There is no limit on the number of tasks you can submit, and we do not have a quota on the number of tasks to be used by a single author. In fact, we once had a single author propose dozens of tasks, and five of them were ultimately admitted.
Q: Do you have any preferences on task styles or topics?
A: No. We have no preferences or quotas on any specific topics. We might propose zero or even four geometry tasks, all depending on the context of the whole contest pool. However, our primary goal for the contest is to create a diverse tasks pool and a balanced problem set with appropriate amounts of thinking and implementation. Some topics, like data structures and combinatorial counting, receive far more proposal submissions than others, making the selection process for these topics extremely competitive. We encourage you to try a more innovative field, and we especially value tasks with deep insight and creativity over advanced knowledge.
Q: What is the definition of "advanced knowledge"? Can I propose a task involving advanced algebra? What about implementing an algorithm mentioned in some FOCS paper?
Q: Again, we do not have a strict syllabus or constraints in our problem-setting process, and everything will be evaluated holistically based on your task approach and the context of the whole contest pool. In our tasks selection process, insight and creativity are the most important factors. A task relying purely on advanced knowledge with no underlying insights might not fit our contest goals. If you decide to propose a task using uncommon competitive programming tricks or advanced techniques, it is best to include more intuitive thoughts or ideas that go beyond the core techniques themselves.
Q: Do you have any examples of good tasks you are looking for?
A: We accept all kinds of tasks. We are not a single-thematic or purely ad-hoc contest, so we cannot really give a definition on what is a good task. Even if you feel your task is not great, it might still be accepted if it fits the needs of our pool. Therefore, submit your task if you are interested.
Q: I want to be an onsite judge. Can I have a spot if my tasks were accepted?
A: We sincerely welcome anyone who wishes to join our judges team. You can apply to be an onsite judge after the problem selection process, and the details will be confirmed after our tasks selection process.
Q: I have more questions...
Q: You can contact me via [email protected].
