Dear all, as the solver description deadline is approaching, we would like to give an update on the current state.
We have added a bunch of test instances to the instances repository. Note that these instances are not the private instances and hence not used for scoring. However, exact solvers producing suboptimal or invalid solution on any instance (and hence on any of these test instances) will be disqualified. Half of the instances are taken from the Stride dataset (thanks to Manuel Penschuck for this project!) while the other half are small and random graphs. We refer to the readme file in the repository for further information.
Note that we have added two late submissions to the list of participating solvers. We have carefully verified that the codebases of those solvers have not been modified after the deadline in order to ensure fairness.
Dear all, the solver submission deadline is approaching. We thank all participants for their participation!
We fixed a small issue within the provided docker environment: the evaluation script handed the instance to the solver via a path descriptor as an argument, not via stdin. We have changed the evaluation script such that the input is provided via stdin, being consistent with optil.io and the description on this webpage. If you have modified your code to take the instance path as an argument, feel free to change it or leave it as it is; just make sure to include a short notice in your installation guide if your solver expects the input not to be provided via stdin. Sorry for the inconvenience!
We provide a docker stack on Github containing the evaluation environment as it will be used for the final evaluation. For further information click here.
We have added information on the submission guideline. Find more information here.
Furthermore we have slightly updated the recently announced scoring system for the heuristic tracks in order to compute a fairer score for instances where the optimal solution size is significantly smaller than the number of vertices. Find more information here.
We have updated the timeline. The deadline for the solvers is Friday, 13.06.2025, 23:59 AOE. Recall this years procedure to ensure the correctness of exact solvers. We have also added a small FAQ.
We expect the preliminary leaderboard on optil to go live within the next few days.
Happy Coding!
We are happy to announce that the public instances are (finally) on GitHub. Please note that we had to compress the instances for the heuristic tracks in order to stay within the file size limit.
Finally, we would like to give a short update on the current status of optil: the team behind optil is still working on setting everything up. We expect the preliminary leaderboard to go live in the near future.
We have prepared a preliminary set of 50 instances for the exact track of the Dominating Set Challenge. Find them on GitHub. For both problems, we plan to add a full set of 100 instances for the exact track as well as a full set of 100 instances for the heuristic track by the end of february.
We are pleased to announce the 10th iteration of PACE, the Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge!
The challenges for this year are Dominating Set and Hitting Set.
Find the details here.
We are pleased to announce the ninth iteration of PACE, the Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge!
The challenge for this year is One-Sided Crossing Minimization.
Find the details here.
The easychair platform to register your solver and later to submit the solver description is now open!
See also the submission requirements of PACE 2022.
We are pleased to announce the seventh iteration of PACE, the Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge!
The challenge for this year is Directed Feedback Vertex Set.
Find the details here.
We are pleased to announce the sixth iteration of PACE, the Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge!
The challenge for this year is Cluster Editing.
Find the details here.
We created a repository which contains all our (public and private) instances. Enjoy! Each instance file has comment lines with instance type (e.g. biology, social networks), origin and description. We hope that the repo will be useful for future PACE organizers and for researchers working in algorithm engineering.
We are happy to announce that you can now submit your solutions to optil.io.
Let us recall that the final deadline for submission is June, 1.
Until the submission deadline, you will be able to test your solution on public instances and see unofficial rankings.
Please note that the ranking published at optil.io is only auxiliary. In particular:
We are happy to announce the fifth iteration of PACE, the Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge. The goal of PACE is to investigate the applicability of algorithmic ideas studied and developed in the subfields of multivariate, fine-grained, parameterized, or fixed-parameter tractable algorithms.
Due to problems with the submission system easychair, we extend the deadline until Monday June 3rd, 2019 (AOE).
We’ve been informed on May 30th that easychair is experiencing network problems which however should have already beenresolved on May 31st (see below).
Nonetheless, due to several requests still reporting problems, we decided to extend the deadline further.
We are currently experiencing some issues with the optil system. The problem was first reported yesterday. According to optil, they ran a system update. We are in contact with the optil team.
Unfortunately, there is a public holiday on May 1st and May 3rd in Poland, so we might get answers not before Monday.
We are happy to announce the fourth iteration of PACE, the Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge.
The goal of PACE is to investigate the applicability of algorithmic ideas studied and developed in the subfields of multivariate, fine-grained, parameterized, or fixed-parameter tractable algorithms. This year, the challenge consists of two separate tracks.
We are happy to announce that PACE 2018 will cooperate again with
OPTIL.io to handle the submission process and the
evaluation of the submissions. OPTIL.io is a website
for organizing programming challenges on optimization problems, created
and maintained by the Institute of Computing
Science of Poznan University of
Technology.
The PACE 2018 challenge has started! This year there is only one problem, Steiner Tree, and three tracks: two for exact algorithms and one for heuristics. To register your team now and find out all the details of the challenge, visit the challenge page.
Due to numerous requests, we decided to allow submissions for Track A and Track B until May 25. Thanks to the cooperation with OPTIL.io, we can still send out the notification on June 1.
We are happy to announce the second iteration of PACE, the Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge. The goal of PACE is to investigate the applicability of algorithmic ideas studied and developed in the subfields of multivariate, fine-grained, parameterized, or fixed-parameter tractable algorithms. The challenge consists of two separate tracks.
The winners of the 1st PACE competition were presented at ALGO
2016 in Aarhus. For
those that couldn’t make it to Aarhus: here are the results. We would
like to thank all participants for making this 1st edition of PACE an
enjoyable and successful one.
The goal of the Parameterized Algorithms and Computational Experiments Challenge (PACE) is to investigate the applicability of algorithmic ideas studied and developed in the subfields of multivariate, fine-grained, parameterized, or fixed-parameter tractable algorithms. In particular, it aims to
