IEEEXtreme: What Did The Penalty Bracket Mean?

The penalty (per challenge), is the time in minutes between the initial release of a challenge and the time at which a team submitted their best answer to that challenge.

For example, the challenge named “Crafting Wooden Tables” was released on the 5th hour of the 14.0 IEEEXtreme competition (05:00 UTC +0).

If a team had their best solution to this challenge submitted at 19:59 (UTC +0), which gives us almost a 15 hour delay, then the penalty for that challenge would be 899 point (14 hours * 60 minutes + 59 minutes = 899 minutes since the release of the challenge.)

Each teams’ total penalty is the sum of all individual penalties.