Welcome!

The CALICO Informatics Competition is a high-school programming competition hosted by students at UC Berkeley. We create contest problems to promote the understanding of useful algorithms and encourage students to grow their problem-solving skills! To see some past problems, check out our Problem Bank.

What Do We Do?

CALICO

Our biannual programming competition is for students up to 12th grade. These contests are run during the fall and spring season, and consist of a large number of problems meant to be solved by teams. Come prepared to bring your best, and we will take care of the rest!

CALSUCO

Our CALSUCO summer contests are open to participants of all ages! Compete as an individual; these contests consist of multiple online, bite-sized rounds run during the summer months. Keep your skills fresh with these lower-stakes, casual contests!

Editor's Choice

These problems almost made the cut for our competitions--so close! These contests are released on our problem bank before CALICO competitions; no registration necessary! Same format, same rules--feel free to use these as practice material, tryouts for teams, or to test your computer setup!

Congratulations to our winning teams
of CALICO Spring '24!

	Geese Scam Crayons	100 points, 696 minutes
	PurpleCrayon \| GusterBuster27 \| Feet McYeet
	poopeepoopee	100 points, 905 minutes
	Yu Zheyuan \| maomao90 \| pavement
	swimming jellyfish	100 points, 960 minutes
	Austin Geng \| Weiming Zhou \| Tyler Sacharow
	Y-Camp Academy	100 Points, 1042 minutes
	Jonathan He \| Julian Wu \| Chongtian Ma
	( ╯ ° □ ° ) ╯ ︵ ┻ ━ ┻	100 Points, 1245 minutes
	Nathan Katov \| Paul Chen \| Austin Jiang

We'd also like to congratulate our top in-person teams!

	600 pounds	100 Points, 1323 minutes
	liympanda \| lxhgww \| sheepforever
	triehards	77 points
	Rohan Garg \| Ryan Fu \| David Zhang

...and congratulations to our top college teams!

	600 pounds	100 Points, 1323 minutes
	liympanda \| lxhgww \| sheepforever
	N-Dimensional Sum from Jollybee	87 points
	Zanite \| Vector \| bonk

Date	Time (PT)	Event
9/20/2024	12:00AM	Registrations Open!
11/15/2024	11:59PM	Registrations Close
11/16/2024	4:00PM	Contest Begins!
	7:00PM	Contest Ends
	8:00PM	Winners Announced!

FAQ

CALICO is open to everyone! However, only teams of pre-college students are eligible to win prizes.

We define "pre-college student" as anyone who has not entered college/university.

Once you've registered, you can expect an email from us after the registration deadline about how to access the contest site. For more information on this, see "Contest Autograder Logistics" under our Contest Guide.

In the meantime, check out our "Preparing for the Contest" checklist, also found on our Contest Guide!

If you know how to work with conditions, loops, strings, and integers, you can start solving problems! At a higher level, our problems give students a preview into concepts taught at various classes within Berkeley's CS department. Regardless of whether you're just starting out or a seasoned programmer, there will be something for you!

All you need is a computer running an approved programming language, a text editor to work with, and a stable internet connection! For a list of approved programming languages, see "Approved Languages" under our Contest Guide.

A maximum of 3 people are allowed to be on a team for CALICO. You're free to have smaller teams, but it's more fun with friends!

Yes! We will be holding an in person contest again this Fall, at the same time as the regular online contest. It will be held on the University of Calfornia Berkeley. Keep an eye out for more information!

The following prizes will be awarded to the winning teams (1 per team):

1st Place: $500 Amazon Gift Card + $200 X-Camp Discount Code
2nd Place: $250 Amazon Gift Card + $150 X-Camp Discount Code
3rd Place: $100 Amazon Gift Card + $100 X-Camp Discount Code
4th & 5th Place: $50 Amazon Gift Card

All X-Camp discount codes are per student on the winning team!

All other students will additionally receive X-Camp discount codes!!

We will also be raffling off the following prizes to individual contestants:

5x $200 X-Camp New Student Tuition Certificates
2x 1 Month Discord Nitro Subscription
6x $10 Gift Card (Amazon, Steam, Apple/Google Play, League of Legends)
1x Brick*

More information on how the raffle will be run and how you can participate can be found under "Raffle Logistics" on our Contest Guide!

All prizes will be distributed to the winning teams following the contest.

*Available for shipping to US only

Check out our Contest Guide to learn about the rules, the structure of the contest, and other technical details!

We've condensed most of the crucial information in this one-page cheat sheet!

If you have a question, don't hesitate to email us at team@calico.cs.berkeley.edu! Feel free to also reach out to us on Discord.

Visit Our Problem Bank!

Past contest problems, along with their full test cases and solutions, can be accessed here! We highly encourage you take a look. Practice problems will also be published here occasionally, so check back here every once in a while!