Dear CodeCheffers!

The very first contest of the year has concluded, and we have a tie for the first seven places!

ACRush again leads the pack with the other six top place winners with him. It was a very well deserved first place for all of them. We also have 2 Indians in the Top 10 this time, with balakrishnan_v being one of the top 7!

Congratulations to all of them: ACRush, balakrishnan_v, Fdg, gennady.korotkevich, mikhailOK, triplem, wcgbg

We have a surprise in the top 7 in the form of Fdg. For all those who have been trying hard into getting into the winners list and not succeeding until now, this contest has shown up a good example. Fdg has been active on CodeChef since quite some time now and for the first time he has broken into the top 10! Our heartiest congratulations to him and hope he keeps on improving from here. We are happy to have mikhailOK make a come back to our long contest in a grand way! An interesting fact to note, he also shared the top spot in the last long contest (AUG11) that he had participated.

Now time for appreciating the efforts of those who brought this exciting contest to you. The dish was cooked by our extremely talented problem setters and a very vigilant tester, in spite of this being his first time.We had quite a few first timers in the problem setting panel as well and what a great job they did.

Sergey Kulik, Tomaz Hocevar, Nikhil Garg, David Stolp, Anton Lunyov, Vitaliy Herasymiv prepared the problems while Hiroto Sekido sampled them before they were served to you. A big applause to all of them for this effort.

Now, let us glance through the statistics and before we move on to see the final winners list.

Contest Statistics:

We observe that the participation has slightly gone down from the last time. As always, we are keenly awaiting your feedback on the quality and the level of difficulty of the problems. We will be happy to do anything that can better your experience.

And now, without any further ado, let me announce the distinct winners for the contest:

India:

1. balakrishnan_v
2. rudradevbasak
3. suh_ash2008
4. sharatiitr
5. ashish.pant
6. imagin
7. dudechandan123
8. mukulgupta
9. manishmap2
10. vaibhavabhi
11. mng88
12. calc_saransh
13. mcsharma1990
14. javadecoder
15. yash_coder
16. shettynamit
17. xyler
18. architk
19. bsrkaditya
20. manan

Rest of the World:

1. ACRush
1. Fdg
1. gennady.korotkevich
1. mikhailOK
1. triplem
1. wcgbg
7. komiya
8. skorknure
9. evgentu
10. fmm

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

If you haven’t yet checked out the editorials for this contest, you can do so here.

We’re running a 2.5-hour Cook-off on Sunday, 22nd of January. It begins at 2130 hrs (Indian Standard Time), so be there!

Cheers,
Team CodeChef.