The main objective of the educational process at the Prahova County Center of Excellence is to support the development of high-achieving students and enhance their individual capacities to the highest level. The need for differentiated schooling has already been successfully implemented in highly developed countries. This has decisively contributed to their sustainable development and economic success by producing highly qualified and motivated individuals with distinguished intellectual and moral qualities capable of excelling and surpassing the limits of human knowledge.

Learning through continuous assessment, using advanced methods and technology, will lead to the formation of young people adaptable to the needs and requirements of the continuously progressing information world.

The main purpose of this project is to offer all students equal chances at participating in a training session in order to achieve high levels of performance in the field of Computer Science, to stimulate their passion for the subject of Informatics and also to promote the youngsters capable of such performances. The starting point was the idea that the stimulation of competitiveness is a strong support for the act of education at its highest standards. The objectives of the competition are the following:

• to encourage the children gifted in the field of Informatics and the assessment of their knowledge on both theoretical and practical levels, with a view to initiating projects meant to provide them with training according to the degree of performance they have achieved;
• to stimulate professional collaboration between teachers and students, as the teams enrolling in this competition are coordinated and trained by specialised teachers and the members of the technical teams consist of both teachers and students that pride themselves on numerous and high performances;
• to provide an exchange of experience between the members and coordinators of the teams at an international level;
• to promote on social media the highly intelligent young children who are passionate about Informatics and technology.

The Committees of the InfO(1) CUP Competition are:

• The competition organisation and secretariat committee, which is responsible for all activities regarding the organisation and smooth running of the competition;
• The competition scientific committee, which is responsible for activities related to the validation of competition subjects, conducting competition tests, and evaluating solutions during competition tests;
• The competition technical committee will create and administer the online evaluation platform for the smooth running of the test and evaluation phase.
• Executive Chairman supervises and is responsible for the entire conduct of the competition. They appoint the scientific committee of the competition, consisting of proposers and evaluators, as well as the technical committee;

The team leader is responsible for enforcing these rules for their team/teams. It is expected that each competitor be physically supervised by the team leader or a person appointed by them. Supervisors for each competition location must be communicated before the first day of the competition (the day designated for system verification preparation isn't counted as a competition day). Each competition location must have at least one supervisor. Supervisors must not be relatives of any of the competitors. Supervisors must ensure that participants do not:

• Attempt to gain access to the root or administrator user;
• Attempt to establish communication with another system, through chat, remote shell, or desktop sharing (Team Viewer, Anydesk, Remote Desktop, etc.);
• Attack the competition server or access online resources directly or indirectly.

Each competition location must be recorded in its entirety during the competition. Multiple feeds from multiple angles can be used for the same competition location.

Recordings must capture the faces of all competitors and the presence of at least one supervisor. It must be determinable from the recordings whether competitors are at the computer and if there is a supervisor in the room at all times. The screens of all competitors must also be recorded. The recording must be of the entire display, and the output video must have at least 5 frames per second and a resolution of 640 x 360.

For screen recording, you can use Kazam on Linux or OBS Studio on Windows or Linux. This is just a recommendation.

At the end of each round, you must send an email with a download/access link to the recordings of each team within 24 hours to [email protected] with the subject Video_[day number]_[team leader's username] (for example, for the first day of the competition, for the team with the team leader's username romania1, the subject of the email should be: Video_1_romania1).

All tasks in InfO(1) Cup are designed to be algorithmic in nature. Efficiency plays an important role in some tasks. When the efficiency of an algorithm is important, test cases will be designed to differentiate solutions with different levels of efficiency; thus, the smallest test cases will be designed so that any rational correct solution to tasks can solve them within the constraints of the task. Therefore, competitors are advised to attempt to solve subtasks even if they do not succeed in solving the complete problems.

The problem set for this competition will consist of 3 tasks per round, and the amount of time students have to solve them will be communicated on the respective day of each round. Tasks can be of the following types:

• Batch tasks: The solution consists of a single source file that reads data from standard input and writes the answer to standard output.
• Interactive problems: The solution consists of a single source file of a program that interacts with the commission's program. The interactive interface can be implemented either by using standard input/output or by interacting with modules provided by the competitor and organisers.
• Output only: Contestants are given input files and must produce correct output files by any available means. For each task, except for output-only tasks, the following limits will be imposed on submissions by competitors: Time and memory limits are specified in the evaluation platform for each problem separately.

The syllabus accepted at InfO(1)Cup is the same as the syllabus of the European Junior Olympiad in Informatics. Only the content marked with green ticks is taken into consideration. The accepted programming language is C++. During the rounds, students will receive partial or complete feedback depending on the situation.

Solutions will be evaluated using the evaluation system integrated into the InfO(1) platform, identical to the one used in the International Olympiad in Informatics. This evaluation is automated, and each candidate receives a score from 0 to 100 points for each task.

After the evaluation process and the conclusion of the competition, the following will be published on the website: the solutions and statements of the problems, the inputs and outputs used in the evaluation process, and the editorials.

The maximum number of submissions will be announced on the day of the round. During the rounds, students will benefit from partial or complete feedback, depending on the situation.

As participants receive real-time feedback during the rounds and considering the regulations adopted by the International Olympiad in Informatics, appeals are not allowed.

The final ranking will consist of the sum of the final scores obtained by students from the invited teams in both rounds, in descending order. Competitors placed at the top of the final ranking will be awarded electronic certificates. The award ceremony will be broadcast live on our YouTube channel.

The competition rules may be modified each year based on technical changes that may arise, based on justified proposals from the organisers.