Hi guys,

The June 2010 Challenge was marred by quite a few incidents that has made picking the winners of this contest quite a challenge. Here are the Top 20 Indian and the top 10 Global winners that we feel are eligible for prize money. This list differs from our ranking table so please take a look at it carefully.

NOTE: Since Vimalkumar does not live in India, he has been shifted from the Indian Winners list to the Global Winners list. This has resulted in some modifications to our list of winners.

India:

1.  Keshav Dhandhania – Rs.10000
2.  Surendra Kumar Meena – Rs.7000
3.  Yash – Rs.5000
4.  Arunabh Trivedi – Rs.4000
5.  Ravi Kiran – Rs.3500
6.  Rajiv Kumar Aggarwal – Rs.2500
7.  Namit D. Shetty – Rs.2500
8.  rhizwanhudda – Rs.2500
9.  Saransh Bansal – Rs.2500
10. Abhijith Reddy D – Rs.2500
11. Imran Khan – Rs.1500
12. Pankaj Kumar – Rs.1500
13. Arijit Banerjee – Rs.1500
14. Rishikesh Dwivedi – Rs.1500
15. vikas – Rs.1500
16. Shrey Banga – Rs.1000
17. Deepak  – Rs.1000
18. Harish Narware – Rs.1000
19. Ritesh Srivastava – Rs.1000
20. Pratham Khandelwal – Rs.1000

Global:

1.  Mark Greve – $300
2.  Tomaz Hocevar – $225
3.  Anton Lunyov – $150
4.  Dmytro Dzhulgakov – $100
5.  Michael Dorfling – $75
6.  Chaemon – $50
7.  Trinh Tuan Phuong – $50
8.  Vimalkumar – $50
9.  Wenyu Cao – $50
10. Kyungmin Min – $50

Contest Statistics:

Congratulations to all of you that won this month and all the best to everybody for the next competition!

(Edited by Admin)

We do not encourage cheating and despise this act in every way, however, we do not like the negativity associated with branding someone a cheater either.

This blog post has been edited to remove the names of those whose code were similar to the leaked code. We are sorry if anyone may have been falsely accused. We would like to move on from this unfortunate episode and on to many more quality contests in the future.

If there is anything that you would like to let us know then do comment on this blog post or send in an email to feedback@codechef.com

Cheers,
Basil

P.S. Winners will be contacted shortly.

Hey CodeCheffers!

We’re very excited to announce 2 CodeChef contests this July!

In addition to our normal monthly contest, we’re hosting a 2.5 hour “Cook-Off” contest. The Cook-Off will include 3 problems:

• An appetizer
• A main course, and
• A dessert.

We’ll release the problems at 9:30 pm (Indian Standard Time) on July 24th and accept answers until 12:00 am (IST) on July 25th. Once we tabulate the results, we’ll award brand new CodeChef t-shirts to the top 20 contestants globally.

Why are we offering a new contest? Because you asked for it! Over the past few months, we’ve received lots of requests for shorter contests from coders, problem setters, and problem testers. In response, we brought your feedback into the kitchen and got the Chef to concoct this new contest format.

We see the Cook-Off as a new type of challenge. While our monthly contests require relentless effort and creativity, the Cook-Off demands quick thinking and sharp focus. If you think you can cook up algorithms faster and better than anyone else, we respectfully invite you to PROVE IT!

As with all first iterations, our first Cook-Off is an experiment (beta-mode). As such, we encourage you to comment and ask us questions about it. If the results are encouraging, we will consider hosting more short contests on a more frequent basis.

Now get into the kitchen and start practicing!

CodeChef  Cook-Off

• Saturday, 24th July
• 9:30 pm to 12:00 am (Indian Standard).
• 3 problems

1. One Appetizer
2. One Main Course
3. One Dessert

Cheers,
Team CodeChef

Hi CodeCheffers,

Today, Directi is pleased to announce the Go for Gold Project, an extensive plan designed to make Indian programmers the best in the world.

We want an Indian team to win the ACM-ICPC contest, the most competitive programming challenge in the world.  We know achieving this won’t be easy (to date, the highest any Indian team has finished is 29th). To encourage our young programmers we are providing the following incentives to students and colleges.

• We will award The Go for Gold Cup to the Indian team that finishes at a higher rank than any other Indian team has reached, in the history of ACM-ICPC.
• The winning team will also take home a significant cash prize, which starts at 5 lakhs and increases every year that it is unclaimed.
• Directi is partnering with IIT-Kanpur and Amrita University – the two institutes that host the ACM ICPC regionals in India. In the future, we plan to
• sponsor other college programming contests across the country as well.
• Coaching and support will be arranged by us for our budding programmers, including intensive training sessions for top teams eventually.
• We will sponsor the teams that qualify for the ACM ICPC world finals, including airfare, accommodation, team uniforms, and more.

Learn more at http://www.codechef.com/goforgold

Directi’s Educational Initiatives: http://wiki.directi.com/display/corp/Educational+Initiatives

Cheers,
Team CodeChef

Hi guys,

Due to the inappropriate activities that so evidently took place in this months contest, we will take a few days to declare the real winners of this competition.

The solutions of the contestants will be manually checked to see if there has been any copying/modification of code. People caught cheating in this contest will not be eligible for prizes and will be banned from the upcoming contests as well.

This process will take a few days and in the mean time we would request participants to be honest about their actions in the contest so that we can reconsider the repercussions.

Regards,
Team CodeChef

P.S. Make sure you check out the editorials to this month’s contest problems here.

Hi guys,

As you all must already be aware, solutions to some of the contest problems have become publicly available. This is quite unfortunate as we have worked really hard at trying to provide you with a good contest.

While we have already banned the user from the contest and have blocked him from our FaceBook page, he has still managed to release the solutions to a large audience.

There is nothing that we can really do about this except for hope that the community takes an honest approach towards the competition and does not use the publicly available solutions. This would defeat the purpose of a fair competition and our ultimate goal, which is to increase education and the quality of programming.

Please note that since solutions to contest problems become public after the competition, users who have used the same code will not be eligible for prizes and may also be banned from future contests.

Regards,
Team CodeChef

Hello fellow contestants,

As promised we’ve thought and pondered and come up with what we could do best in the given situation. With great help from our problem setters and tester we have managed to come up with another problem for the contest. The problem “Stable Marriage” has been replaced with a new problem “Tidying Posters“. Hopefully, you will find this one just as exciting as the previous problem.
Apologies for the time lost under the given circumstances and best of luck for the rest of the contest.

Sincerely,
Team CodeChef

P.S. Thank you everyone for all the co-operation.

We regretfully inform you that the contest problem, Stable Marriage, seems to be identical to an existing problem in another contest; the solution to which is publicly available. For this reason we have removed the problem from the contest. We are working on coming up with the best solution to the situation and will keep you posted on our next steps. We once again apologize for this undesirable situation.