Welcome to the first ever Art Academy Contest!

The problem writers are A_L_I_C_E_, astrocat879, skyflaren, and MehMehMeh.

Shoutout to AvaLovelace and Zeyu for testing and help :blobaww:

Please note that this contest will be full feedback.

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This contest will consist of 6 main problems, the difficulty of which may range anywhere from CCC Junior to CCO level. This contest will feature a 7-th problem (Problem 0) for students who are just getting started with programming. This contest will also feature a 8-th problem (Problem 1), the inspiration for this entire contest. However, since it has been released on mcpt.ca already, it will not reward points in contest for solves.

Some problems offer partial marks in the form of subtasks. If you cannot solve a problem fully, we encourage you to go for these partial marks.

You will have 3 hours to complete the contest. After the contest window begins, you may begin at any time. Once you enter the contest, your personal timer will start counting down and you will be able to submit until 3 hours from when you started, or until the hard deadline (11:59PM EDT of April 19th), whichever comes first.

After joining the contest, proceed to the Problems tab to begin. You can also go to Users if you wish to see the rankings.

We have listed below some advice as well as contest strategies:

• Ties will be broken by the last submission time that increased your score plus penalties. The first submission time of your highest score will be used.
• Each non-AC (excluding Compiler Errors) submission will incur a penalty of 5 minutes.
• It is guaranteed that the problems will not be in order of increasing difficulty. However, the amount of points each problem gives will roughly correlate with the difficulty of the problem. Reading all of the statements is still recommended, as some of the problems may be easier for you.
• Remove all extra debugging code and/or input prompts from your code before submitting. The judge is very strict — most of the time, it requires your output to match exactly.
• Do not pause program execution at the end. The judging process is automated. You should use stdin / stdout to perform input / output, respectively.
• It is guaranteed that all the problems will be solvable with Java 8, PyPy 2, and C / C++.

Clarification requests for the contest must be routed through the clarification system provided on DMOJ, and not through other channels including but not limited to Slack and Discord.

Note: this contest will not be rated.

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The light was dim.

It was a cloudy night, and the moon was cloaked behind a thick layer of clouds. It had only been three months since you were first put to this new lifestyle: critiquing art, day in, day out.

With a tired sigh, you stand up.

It all happened too fast. At the grocery store, a large, hooded man came, and before you knew it, you found yourself blindfolded, scared, and in the back of a van on the way to some unknown place. Once you woke up, you found yourself in a dark, damp basement with about three dozen other people just as confused as you were. 

You and your peers soon learned more about your captor: a suede, middle-aged man who goes by the handle "hewmatt10". Obsessed with art and some "master plan" he keeps murmuring about, he feeds you decent camp food. Dry biscuits, mushy bananas, and expired yogurt for breakfast; you'd think a man of his tastes would be able to afford better food.

The days are blurred and all the same.

Wake up, stare at art, get yelled at by hewmatt10 for not staring enough at his art, and then going to bed. Talking was strictly forbidden amongst the captives, and anyone caught not staring at art was immediately taken away to an unknown fate. As the weeks passed by, the number dwindled mysteriously. The three dozen became two dozen became half a dozen, until it was just you and one other. A tall, lanky man likely in his mid-twenties, his name was Alan and worked as a black market owl dealer before he was kidnapped.

But then one night he was gone, and it was just you.

Waking up from the trance-like state, you hear a clang. hewmatt10 walks down the stairs, and in his hand was a new painting.

"My latest work. Now stare," he commanded. You obeyed.

"It reminds me of Van Gogh." On a large canvas, there were exactly three strokes of paint. A long, red, vertical one went straight down the center, with two green, smaller strokes down the left and right side. Underneath was a sea of yellow paint, seeming to have been splotched on by a toddler. "It's very dream-like," you add, knowing if you say anything remotely negative, you will be reprimanded.

"Good," he nods, leaving up the stairs with the painting. "I'll be back with another masterpiece by dusk."

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Before the contest date, you may wish to check out the tips and help pages.