What reference materials would you bring to a programming competition?

Question

For the ACM-ICPC programming competition, teams are allowed to bring any printed materials. Books, pages of equations, even code. Language documentation (e.g. the Java API) can be accessed online.

So far, we're bringing geometry equations that could be useful, implementation of a few algorithms that can be tricky to get exactly right such as binary search, and any textbooks that look useful.

Can you recommend any other materials that might be useful?

Answer 1

Don't know what the competition focuses on exactly, but it might be wise to take some of the more famous Algorithm's pseudo code.

For instance, some of the sorting algorithms would be a good thing to bring I think.

Answer 2

1. Introduction To Algorithms
2. Algorithm Design Manual
3. Programming Challenges
4. A HUGE BIG list of printed solutions from previous competitions, ordered by similiarity.

Answer 3

I once lost a competition because I hadn't yet encountered the Traveling Salesman Problem.

Also, I used to bring a printout of a small but decent console logging API, put it into place immediately, and use it to instrument my solutions. This was immensely helpful whenever I submitted a wrong answer, usually leading to a quick debug cycle.