Aw, I don’t even get a mention as the real second place

The contest was good; the issues now that you’re on Drupal were quite annoying (not being able to find my submission from early on due to it not being linked to on my submissions page, etc), but hopefully those will be ironed out by the next contest.

Only other thing that I should mention – just like with the Golf course problem from the August contest, expecting people to read/write around a million integers puts far too much emphasis on input/output routines. This is especially true in challenge problems, where every split second counts – whoever has the fastest way of reading input gets more time to process it, and using scanf/printf tends to not be good enough, which would put off the majority of solvers.

I suggest making problems which involve a lot less input/output.

But still an enjoyable contest, and plugged the gap between main contests quite nicely.

Aw, I don’t even get a mention as the real second place

The contest was good; the issues now that you’re on Drupal were quite annoying (not being able to find my submission from early on due to it not being linked to on my submissions page, etc), but hopefully those will be ironed out by the next contest.

Only other thing that I should mention – just like with the Golf course problem from the August contest, expecting people to read/write around a million integers puts far too much emphasis on input/output routines. This is especially true in challenge problems, where every split second counts – whoever has the fastest way of reading input gets more time to process it, and using scanf/printf tends to not be good enough, which would put off the majority of solvers.

I suggest making problems which involve a lot less input/output.

But still an enjoyable contest, and plugged the gap between main contests quite nicely.

I agree with you Stephen, i had to use highly optimized IO routines. I think input and output files could go upto 4 MB each which is hard for beginners.
A good suggestion would be this ( especially for longer contests )
since the number of submissions is limited to 20 per day, it makes sense giving them higher time limits like 10-15 seconds. I hope the shorter contests become more like longer contests with more problems but the difficulty should be suitable given the shorter time span.
And yes the not-being-able-to-download solutions was quite annoying but I’m quite confident that the Codechef team would get it sorted
Regards to the CC team. Keep up the good work.

I agree with you Stephen, i had to use highly optimized IO routines. I think input and output files could go upto 4 MB each which is hard for beginners.
A good suggestion would be this ( especially for longer contests )
since the number of submissions is limited to 20 per day, it makes sense giving them higher time limits like 10-15 seconds. I hope the shorter contests become more like longer contests with more problems but the difficulty should be suitable given the shorter time span.
And yes the not-being-able-to-download solutions was quite annoying but I’m quite confident that the Codechef team would get it sorted
Regards to the CC team. Keep up the good work.

I was pretty disappointed to see that there was only one problem. I was hoping for five or six like in the normal monthly competitions such that the winners might actually be decided by how many problems were solved rather than just by the tiebreaker.

That said, I agree that a longer time limit for tie-breaker problems would be useful. I was able to get the I/O time down quite a bit by buffering input and output on my own, but using scanf() and printf() would probably have left very little time for actually doing any processing. Having less I/O for tie-breaker problems is a possibility, but it shouldn’t be too small or people will do datamining on it.

I was pretty disappointed to see that there was only one problem. I was hoping for five or six like in the normal monthly competitions such that the winners might actually be decided by how many problems were solved rather than just by the tiebreaker.

That said, I agree that a longer time limit for tie-breaker problems would be useful. I was able to get the I/O time down quite a bit by buffering input and output on my own, but using scanf() and printf() would probably have left very little time for actually doing any processing. Having less I/O for tie-breaker problems is a possibility, but it shouldn’t be too small or people will do datamining on it.

As a budding participant of Codechef, I hope Codechef continues to grow and satisfy my programming appetites. I wish I’d discovered this site earlier. The prize money is also a major factor that pushes me to keep continuing .

It’s feedback time now :

1) Although we cannot do anything about it, it is not appreciating to find out that I/O plays a major role in acing the problems. It took quite some time for me to see that my cin, cout was causing timeouts even without doing any processing. I started using printf, scanf’s, but that seems not the best way apparently. So probably I/O could reduce to a level where it’s not significant.

2) For any problem, under the “successful submissions for the problem”, I’d like to see the “View solution” next to each entry. It’s time consuming to dig out the correct solutions from ‘recent activity for this problem’.

3) Though there have been explanations, I still probably don’t understand the time taken info. Time taken is supposed to be the time taken to execute for all test cases. But then I wonder if it’s true that some have solved in 1.69 secs while others have taken as much as 21 seconds for Aug mini.

4) I feel the way the solutions are ranked to a particular problem is misleading. Sudoku solver is ranked based on time taken to execute whereas the total score (aka penalty) is what counts in the final ranking. Shouldn’t the solutions be ranked according to the defined criteria?

5) Josh Metzler has hinted at having more problems for the mini challenge. I’d suggest keeping it just one or two for a duration of 2 days (it’s a mini challenge after all!) so that if I don’t have time to participate in the monthly ones, I will at least get to participate in the mini’s.

Concluding note :
I immensely appreciate this initiative by DirectI and wish Codechef becomes THE place for “programmers” to hang around.

As a budding participant of Codechef, I hope Codechef continues to grow and satisfy my programming appetites. I wish I’d discovered this site earlier. The prize money is also a major factor that pushes me to keep continuing .

It’s feedback time now :

1) Although we cannot do anything about it, it is not appreciating to find out that I/O plays a major role in acing the problems. It took quite some time for me to see that my cin, cout was causing timeouts even without doing any processing. I started using printf, scanf’s, but that seems not the best way apparently. So probably I/O could reduce to a level where it’s not significant.

2) For any problem, under the “successful submissions for the problem”, I’d like to see the “View solution” next to each entry. It’s time consuming to dig out the correct solutions from ‘recent activity for this problem’.

3) Though there have been explanations, I still probably don’t understand the time taken info. Time taken is supposed to be the time taken to execute for all test cases. But then I wonder if it’s true that some have solved in 1.69 secs while others have taken as much as 21 seconds for Aug mini.

4) I feel the way the solutions are ranked to a particular problem is misleading. Sudoku solver is ranked based on time taken to execute whereas the total score (aka penalty) is what counts in the final ranking. Shouldn’t the solutions be ranked according to the defined criteria?

5) Josh Metzler has hinted at having more problems for the mini challenge. I’d suggest keeping it just one or two for a duration of 2 days (it’s a mini challenge after all!) so that if I don’t have time to participate in the monthly ones, I will at least get to participate in the mini’s.

Concluding note :
I immensely appreciate this initiative by DirectI and wish Codechef becomes THE place for “programmers” to hang around.

Nice contest and a weekend well spent

I actually liked the fact that the contest had only problem — gives a different flavor than the longer contest.

Other than that, I agree with other about the I/O issues and would like to see longer time limits, so that I/O is not a big factor.

Nice contest and a weekend well spent

I actually liked the fact that the contest had only problem — gives a different flavor than the longer contest.

Other than that, I agree with other about the I/O issues and would like to see longer time limits, so that I/O is not a big factor.

Thank You for the feedback till now We will definitely consider having problems which don’t place much of an emphasis on I/O routines.

The major reason for having only one tie-breaker was that in the past few contests, it has always been the tie breaker that decides the winners

Thank You for the feedback till now We will definitely consider having problems which don’t place much of an emphasis on I/O routines.

The major reason for having only one tie-breaker was that in the past few contests, it has always been the tie breaker that decides the winners

@Yashwant: My submission that took 1.69s simply read the input and wrote the output, replacing all unspecified numbers with 1′s. Its purpose was to test the speed of my I/O routines. My fastest submission to get a 0.9xx score took ~9s overall.

@Aniruddha: I understand the need for a tie breaker problem – I was just hoping that maybe this shorter competition would be the one to break the streak of competitions that are decided by the tie breaker.

@Yashwant: My submission that took 1.69s simply read the input and wrote the output, replacing all unspecified numbers with 1′s. Its purpose was to test the speed of my I/O routines. My fastest submission to get a 0.9xx score took ~9s overall.

@Aniruddha: I understand the need for a tie breaker problem – I was just hoping that maybe this shorter competition would be the one to break the streak of competitions that are decided by the tie breaker.