Beloved CodeCheffers,

What a way to end the year! All our previous records have been shattered!!!

Let me make this official – this has been our most highly participated Cook-Off till date Also let me break the tradition and first share with you the stats as I am still unable to gulp them.

As you can see, by pure numbers, we have the highest user participation and highest number of total submissions in the history of CodeChef Cook-Off’s (The previous high being 566 users in the fourteenth edition and 3231 submissions in the sixth edition) and by some margin!

Let me congratulate and thank Hiroto Sekido and Shangjingbo for giving us this brilliant contest. Please raise a toast for both Hiroto and Shangjingbo. <claps>

Now, the contest summary! The contest started with a whammy for us. We know this has been a consistent problem since the last few contest with the problem statements not being visible for an initial period. Though we feel embarrassed to apologize again, we can’t help but beg your pardon. We are working hard to solve this problem.

So much for the bad part. After the initial glitch, we got first submissions for CIELAB, which eventually saw 642 submissions. CIEL8STR also saw 216 submissions. These were the 2 problems that most of the participants attempted first. By the time theses they were submitted the leader board was settled and remained idle for some time.

mmaxio made the first kill by solving CIELQUIZ and raised the bar for others. His competitors didn’t sit idle and soon after the leader board kept on tumbling. EgorK ruled the charts till the end by solving 4 problems first.

We, admins, had put our bets on EgorK in the last 20 minutes to win, with the exception Hiroto, who wanted lyrically to take the honors (shhhh). No one was able to solve CIELWALK till the very end and our problem setting/testing panel started wondering whether this was too hard a problem for a Cook-Off. But thankfully, gojira proved them wrong.

Our very own Indian compatriot rudradevbasak broke into the top 10 in the last few minutes. This is the first appearance of an Indian in the Top 3 in Cook-Off’s. Way to go Rudradev. We wish you bring more glory to India in the ICPC world finals. And we also hope that other Indian participants follow suit.

In all, it was a brilliantly fought out contest and we thank all of you in making this Cook-Off a great success. We are further motivated to bring better problem sets for the next Cook-Off’s.

And the winners are…

1.) EgorK
2.) dzhulgakov
3.) rudradevbasak
4.) anton_lunyov
5.) Gassa
6.) petr
7.) lyrically
8.) raveman
9.) mmaxio
10.) al13n

The final Cook-Off rankings can we viewed here. Don’t forget to ask your questions directly to the problem setter here.

The short contest ratings have also been updated. gennady.korotkevich still rules the rank list even after a disappointing end to a glorious year. EgorK has closed in to both gennady and laycurse after his brilliant performance to end the year on a big high. What makes this performance special is that all the 4 higher rated players in this contest were participating and he still came on top. This performance has made him climb 2 places from 5th to 3rd! rudradevbasak is now ranked 22nd globally and 1st on the Indian rank list. Checkout where you stand before you start 2012 here.

That is all from us for now. We will be hosting our usual Long Contest at the start of the next month which incidentally also happens to be the beginning of a new calendar year.

Let me take this opportunity to wish each and everyone of you a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year on behalf of the entire CodeChef team.

Happy Holidays,
Tojo
Team CodeChef.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The December Long Contest for 2011 has concluded, and no prizes for guessing, we have a clear winner this time. Without any need of an introduction, Tiancheng Lou leads the pack for the second consecutive time. He has figured in the top 2 for seven times in this year and finishes the year on a high taking the top slot once again! It has also been a tremendous performance from Hirose from Japan, a first appearance in the top 10. Congratulations to both of them.

The Indian rank list has 16 contestants tied at the 7th position with many new faces in the top 20! For the first time Balajiganapathi has cracked the top 2 and in what a style! The second place deserves a special mention for being occupied by the relatively unknown but very promising Archit Karandikar from IIT Indore, closely followed by Anoop Chaurasiya. As with Balaji, this is their best performance till date on CodeChef and we hope that they only improve from here. Congratulations to both of them.

Needless to say all the excitement of the contest wouldn’t have been served had the dish not been cooked so well by our extremely talented problem setters and the very vigilant tester.

AnhDQ, Gennady Korotkevitch, Hiroto Sekido and Vamsi Kavala prepared the problems while the most reliable David Stolp sampled them before they were served to you.

The statistics and the final winners list follow:

Contest Statistics:

Not withstanding the difficult problem set, the participation improved quite a bit from the last time. This is encouraging. We will still be glad to know from the community if there is anything that we can do to improve participation more. Please give us the feedback on the quality and level of difficulty of the problems.

And now, here are the distinct winners for the December contest:

India:

1. balajiganapath
2. architk
3. imagin
4. udayrocks2k8
5. anshulgoyal
6. svm11
7. ashish.pant
7. balakrishnan_v
7. bittu_it
7. crazysaikat
7. dudechandan123
7. gurpreet_09
7. javadecoder
7. Johar
7. mcsharma1990
7. mng88
7. mukulgupta
7. navinag
7. saurabhmodi102000
7. sharatiitr
7. vaibhavbahl
7. xyler

Rest of the World:

1. ACRush
2. hirosegolf
3. gawry
4. iscsi
5. binon
6. pasin30055
7. hiphip
8. shindo
9. ushsh
10. success

That is all for now. Congratulations to all, once again.

If you haven’t yet checked out the editorials for this contest, you can do so here. Do not forget to pester the problem setter with all your doubts there. Yes they will answer each one of your questions directly.

We’re running a 2.5-hour Cook-off on Sunday, the 18th of December. It begins at 2130 hrs, so be there!

Cheers,
Team CodeChef.

Hey Guys n Gals,

Amidst all your feature requests we have added the much awaited “deleting your comment” feature. What this means is that now you will be able to delete any comment posted by you without waiting for the admins to approve it! Hope this makes life slightly more convenient for you and also help you to keep the comments section clean.

CodeChef moderators will now be able to un-publish/approve comments that they deem inappropriate directly from the comments section.

Keep dropping in your suggestions to feedback@codechef.com. The next feature to be taken up can be yours.

–Tojo
(Team CodeChef)