Prologue: Recovering From Recession

International Geek Gadgets, Ltd (IGG) is heavily affected by the current economic recession. The CEO, your old friend, is struggling to find a way out. She already identified the seven major areas in the company where optimizing current processes could result in a noticeable increase of efficiency. She has also realized such optimization would require the help of computer programs.

Instead of hiring an expensive analyst, she thought you'd help her on the basis of friendship - and she offered you the 35 years old PDP-11 gathering dust in her basement to sweeten the deal, if everything goes well.

Beside optimizing business processes, she also opted for advanced quality assurance qualification - auditors are scheduled to arrive in five hours and will have unlimited power to screen any activity in the company. After the auditors put their stamp on the papers, it will be impossible to change any process further.

You enlisted the help of two of your even geekier friends to have a chance at meeting the deadline. You have only five hours to solve as many of the seven deficiencies as possible.

Task Summary

Task	Scaling	Wrong answer penalty	Delay	Input format
A. Cutting back middle management	No	-5 points	60s	text
B. Requirements	No	-5 points	60s	text
C. Road roller	Yes	-5 points	60s	text
D. Octal CNC	No	-5 points	60s	png
E. Stack compressor	-	-5 points	60s	text
F. Backup communication	No	-5 points	60s	text
G. Trains	No	-5 points	60s	wav

Scaling: The score for this problem may change over time depending on submissions by other teams. (Note that your last submission is considered and not your best one.)
Wrong answer penalty: Penalty after each wrong output submitted.
Delay: Time duration until no solution can be submitted for the same input.
E is a special problem that's scaled against fixed constants (see the task description for details).

For each task there is a dedicated irc channel for questions: #a, #b, #c, #d, #e, #f, #g.