Midnight greetings, CodeCheffers!

The September Cook-off, in collaboration with Directi’s Go for Gold initiative, and the Amritapuri ACM ICPC regionals warm up contest has concluded, amidst subdued cheers in our office; this was the highest ever participation for a Cook-off, and we have no one to thank for that but all of you, the participants.

Of course, this would never have been possible without our problem setter, the evergreen David Stolp, and our debuting problem tester, Aleksey Tolstikov. Our most sincere gratitude to the both of you for making this possible.

We employed the cluster judging system for this Cook-off, and this ensured its smooth progress throughout the 150-minute duration. Our developers’ were smiling throughout.

Now, to move on to the winners of this special Cook-off:

01. laycurse
02. nevidomy
03. gawry
04. forest
05. ilyakor
06. phinfinity
07. fhlasek
08. Igor Kudryashov
09. Amtrix
10. acube

The final Cook-off rankings can be viewed here.

The statistics for the September Cook-off are as follows:

As you may have noticed, there was a great increase in the Indian number of participants, and this was undeniably because of Amritapuri University’s ACM ICPC regionals warm up contest collaborating with us.

A special mention to laycurse, whose stellar performance in the September and August Cook-offs has enabled him to close the gap between him and first-placed gennady to a hair’s breadth in the short contest rankings. Good to see someone gunning for that top spot!

David Stolp’s editorials can be viewed here.

We look forward to seeing all of you participating in the October 2011 Challenge that begins on 1st October, 2011.

If there is anything you would like to let us know regarding this contest then do let us know by either commenting below this blog post or by sending in an email to feedback@codechef.com.

Cheers,

Adarsh Loyal.

Fellow programmers!

This is to inform you that we have secured the cluster judging option on CodeChef; we have always received feedback about the judge’s delayed response-time, and cluster judging will now double the judge’s response speed, such that you can forget the slow judge of yesteryear. You can experience it first-hand at all our practice sections.

We’re encouraging any feedback you can give us regarding anomalies that you may come across while submitting your solutions, and we’ll fix it right away – Once we have ensured our cluster judging system is flawless, we’ll be activating it for our contests.

Therefore, if we can work together on this and work fast enough, we can employ cluster judging for this Sunday’s Cook-off.
So, let’s make this happen!

Bon soir(!) my algorithm-toting friends.

As you may well know, the September Cook-off goes live this Sunday, 18th September 2011.

What you may NOT know, is that this is the last short contest we’re conducting before the online round of the Amritapuri ACM-ICPC regionals 2011, which takes place on the 16th of October.

Grab the opportunity to gear up for it with the September CookOff, our warm up to the Amritapuri regionals. You’re going to need all the practice you can get!

The Cook-off will commence at 2130 hrs, IST. As usual, submission-time ends with the day. Don’t forget to bring your A-game!

Wondering what the ACM ICPC  regionals are?

They are the qualifying round to the olympics of all programming competitions, the ACM ICPC World Finals, taking place in Warsaw, Poland this time! Find out more here.

Register for the Amritapuri regionals here.