Gennady Korotkevich worked out a perfect lightning quick strategy to win the CodeChef March Cook-Off. He took a lead at the very start and remained unbeatable till the very end. I bet this would have been a sweeter victory for him had he solved CIELWEB too. Incidentally, CIELWEB remains the unsolvable problem in the contest.

KADR and mikhailOK stacked up behind Gennady to take up the 2nd and 3rd place respectively. Congratulations guys!!

This Cook-Off was the second contest being dished out by Hiroto Sekido. And not without the work of Rajiv Aggrawal who checked out each and every ingredient and guided Hiroto in coming out with a good problem set. Thanks a lot Hiroto and Rajiv. You did a great job.

The contest started with an anticipation of a good fight between Gennady and EgorK. This we saw has been brewing up since the last contest in which EgorK notched up the first place and reduced the lead that Gennady had enjoyed so far. We were expecting him to make an entry till the very end. We missed you EgorK.

The disappointment was short lived though, as we witnessed a fierce battle for the 2nd and 3rd position between al13n, KADR and mikhailOK – all interchanging positions multiple times during the contest.

CIELNUM1 and CIELNUM2 appeared to be the easiest of the lot and we saw around 100 submissions for both the problems in the first half an hour of the contest. There was some trouble in understanding the statement for these problems initially, but our problem setter and tester tried their best to remove all the doubts. An area for us to improve.

The next hour saw participants trying intensely to get a successful submission for CIELLAND and CIELGAME. In the end, only the top 4 contestants could solve 4 problems from the entire set of 5. This problem set seemed to be a bit on the harder side. The editorials have been put up immediately to help you guys checkout all your doubts about the problems. Also feel free to ask your questions directly to our problem setter there.

Here are the official winners for the contest:
1.) gennady.korotkevich
2.) KADR
3.) mikhailOK
4.) al13n
5.) homo_sapiens
6.) uwi
7.) pperm
8.) niyaznigmatul
9.) mmaxio
10.) num314

rudradevbasak was the the top scorer for India at 19th position. He remains 22nd on the short contest rankings list.

And finally here are the stats:

The short contest rankings has now been heavily tilted to Gennady’s advantage as he has increased his rating points tally to 4723 from 4027. He enjoys a healthy lead of 800 points over EgorK who remains at 3891 points after his no show. Another mover in the top-10 rankings is al13n who moves to 7th place from his previous 8th. mmaxio also breaks into the top-10 after his consistently improving performance in the last few contests.

We now prepare for the April Long Contest which is being set by a good team of problem setters. We also have a few new faces among them. Hopefully you will like their problems. We will be back again with our next contest on the 1st of April. Do not forget to participate in this one. There are the new long contest rating points at stake

We also hope that you have been using our new forums to get your queries answered. We already have some interesting questions lined up there. Do not forget to check the questions out and answer the ones that you can . Please help out the community and gain karma. We need your support to build a self moderating community to help out each other. And do not forget to send us your feedback – good or bad, we love it.

That is all from me for now. Happy Coding!!!

-Tojo,
Team CodeChef.

Bonjour,

How quickly does time fly by? Seems only yesterday that the 3rd Anniversary edition of our Long Contest started and every one here was in a celebration mood (as depicted in these pics). Unfortunately, time has brought us again to the end of another appetizing March Long Contest. As most of us know this was a special contest which saw us foray in the 4th year of our successful en-devour.

We cannot give any prizes for guessing the winner, as we have tie!! Yes, and its a coincidence that we have a 3-way tie for our 3rd anniversary contest . The 1st place is shared by ACRush, hirosegolf and snapdragon with perfect 10 points. They were the only participants who could finish up our entire meal of 10 problems. lepetrandr is some distance away at 4th. Well done guys. Your guys deserve the top spot.

The Indian rank list is devoid of any tie and we have a clear winner in rudradevbasak. kiranjot and shadow follow him in 2nd and 3rd place respectively. Congratulations to all of them.

Here are the top ten Global/top twenty Indian winners and their positions:

Global:

1.) ACRush
1.) hirosegolf
1.) snapdragon
4.) lepetrandr
5.) acube
6.) ushsh
7.) skorknure
8.) tanzaku
9.) emkjp
10.) enot

Indian:

1.) rudradevbasak
2.) kiranjot
3.) shadow
4.) dudechandan123
5.) Idiotsid
6.) gultus
7.) ashish_massand
8.) shettynamit
9.) sunny816.iitr
10.) rizwanhudda
10.) sharatiitr
10.) smithinsu
13.) digo
14.) chetan_ug2k10
14.) diamondfist
14.) mischievous_me
14.) shubhanshu
14.) suh_ash2008
14.) viv001
20.) ashish.pant
20.) mcsharma1990
20.) pradeep_chf
20.) rishabhm

Congratulations to each and everyone.

The contest was a success, with slightly lower participation than the previous February Long Contest in terms of numbers. But we are not loosing our sleep over it, as long as you guys enjoyed and relished the problem set laid out for you.Do let us know what you think. I believe the this will be made up in the next contest.

The people without whom the problem set would not be possible: Hiroto Sekido, Duc, Shilp Gupta, Nikhil Garg, Sergey Kulik, Vamsi Kavala, Vitaliy Herasymiv. Let us reserve some applaud for them. Not to forget our ever-diligent problem tester Anton Lunyov. This guy has been extremely professional in his testing duties. He has been consistently testing out our Long Contest problem-set in spite of his internship duties in one of the top web company. A big applause for him. Our setters have also prepared the editorials for those who found the going tough in the contest. You can read them here.

A short mention for the Challenge problem TOMJERRY, which took some time to be ‘contest-ready’. The problem was originally authored by Duc who had to leave it halfway due to his professional commitments. The problem was taken up by Shilp Gupta, who, I bet, had to spent some sleepless nights to come up with solid proof test cases for the problem. And the nights were prolonged by some continuous invalidation of those cases by the wily Anton! And the time zone difference between them certainly did not help either’s sleep. Thanks a lot Shilp and Anton. You are amazing!

Now for the contest statistics:

We have been quite satisfied with way Short Contest Ratings are turning up and it breathes some stiff competition in the contest as well. There was no doubt amongst us, here at CodeChef, that our Long Contest Ratings should also be based on the ELO Rating. And, so as we had promised we have enabled ELO ratings for our Long Contest ratings calculation and it is live now. You can check your new Long Contest Rating here. What this implies is that you will be able to hold on to the your spot only if you are consistent.

So what are you guys waiting for? Sharpen up your skills for our next Long Contest coming up on 1st of April.

For those who wish to see the old archived Long Contest ratings, you can view them here.

For our new users you can read more about the implementation of our rating system here.

We have also launched a newly revamped forums section a là stackoverflow style. We already have a few questions on the forums and more waiting to be asked. We are also planning to put up frequently emailed questions up on the forums. So keep watching that space.

That’s all from our side. Do keep pouring in your feedback at feedback@codechef.com. Next, we have our March Short Contest(COOK20) coming up. The problems are undergoing stringent testing as I write this post. The banner for the short contest will be posted soon. Do let us know if you like it. We have EgorK trailing Gennady by a narrow margin in the Short Contest ratings. Will he dis-mantle Gennady from the top spot? Don’t miss the action

-Regards,
Tojo

The celebrations of our 3rd anniversary are not yet over. Its time to rejoice once again as we are launching today the new Questions and Answer styled CodeChef Discuss.

We know we took a while to do this.  It started as an internship project of one of our fellow CodeCheffers, Balajiganapathi in the month of June 2011!  But then we got caught up between various other things and somehow this lost steam. We are grateful to Balaji for taking this up and today we are happy to be able to make “his project” see the light of the day. We are very hopeful that our now dormant community will benefit from this and will become more vibrant. Please read the FAQ for more details about the new forums.

Yes, the new forum site is now live. Once the DNS propagation happens you will be able to visit it at the same old URL. Till then you may face a redirection. The old forums will remain for a while at the new URL.

So what are you waiting for? Let us make asking Questions and giving Answers a fun process and in the process help each other around. For any queries or assistance related to new forums send in an email to help@codechef.com.

And please keep sending us your feedback, both good and bad.

Cheers,
Tojo Chacko
(Team CodeChef)

Today, as we step into our fourth year, we are embraced by a gamut of emotions. We feel as fluttery as we did when we had started. And at the same time we also feel confident about what we are doing and all that we intend to do. Three years have passed by, but it does not seem that long. It was just the other day that we started trying to provide some sort of a platform targeted primarily towards the Indian programming community and fighting hard to come to terms with the challenge. Today, we not only have the Indian programmer in our contests, we also have the best programmers from across the globe joining hands with us to engage the community and make it exciting, competitive and a fun learning experience for all.

However, the path till here has not been without any hiccups. We have faced many challenges in between – both small and big, some good and some bad, some that we knew how to handle and some that we learned only when they hit us. We have certainly not been perfect. All this made us believe that we have seen it all. But we know that there is a lot more to come and we are not taking it easy. If anything, we only feel confident. The appreciation emails and comments that we receive provide us an impetus to give that extra bit.

And the journey has been a thorough learning experience for each one of us too. Not that we saw ourselves here when we started. And we are happy that we are here today. This wouldn’t have been possible without the contributions of various people who have helped us in our endeavor:

• The brilliant problem setters and testers who have created and validated the amazing collection of problems that we can boast of today,
• The SPOJ team which has been tirelessly working in the background to give us a very powerful judge program,
• The community out there that is helping other programmers to resolve their doubts,
• The various support teams and people here at Directi, who enable the functioning of the CodeChef team,
• The ex-members of our very own team,
• And finally and most importantly you all for your participation and absolutely amazing feedback and critique.

We feel deeply grateful and humbled to have all your support today.

Let me take this opportunity to try and summarize where we stand after these 3 years:

• What started as a unique 10 day long contest hosting platform, we quickly added to it the shorter format and will be hosting the 20th successful short contest this month.
• The user base has grown close to 1,00,000 globally.
• We have a whopping number of 1793 unique problems in our practice section and it is growing by at least 24 problems per month.
• We have hosted close to 200 college contests other than the regular contests conducted by us.
• Our problem setting/testing panel has grown to a size of 50 including many of the top programmers from across the globe.
• We have had 8,77,447 submissions to problems made by 33151 different users/teams and this will be stale data by the time you are reading this.
• We received more than 600 emails from the community and responded to each one of them in the last year alone.
• We have Campus chapters in almost all the prominent and many more colleges from across the country.
• We have distributed goodies to more than 35 cities in India and 80 cities to other parts of the globe just in the last 4 months.
• We introduced the find a bug and get a goody policy and have given away 10 t-shirts to people who have helped us in finding bugs as a token of our appreciation.
• More than 15000 fans are on our Facebook page and we have close to 2500 followers on Twitter.

Today, we are on the doorsteps of addressing one of the many issues in our long list of “to be done’s”. We are about to launch a new Forum. We have received a whole lot of feedback from you guys to make the forums more interesting and active. We have been working on it all this while to present you a Question and Answer Style forum, which we believe is more suited to a community like CodeChef. Keep watching this space on more about it. They will be up soon.

We will also be changing the present long contest rating system to the more dynamic ELO based rating system by the end of the running contest. Hopefully it will make the game more exciting and competitive. Next in line will be the revamp of our tutorials/editorials sections. This is one area where we have received a lot of feedback to improve upon. We have been able to do only so much till now. Hopefully this will change soon.

Yesterday, we took time off from work and pampered ourselves in celebrating our third anniversary as a gesture of patting us on our back! Please check out the photos and spare a moment to wish us a Happy Birthday.

We have grown by leaps and bounds and we cannot thank you enough for this. We have started expanding our dream to provide to all the students across the globe the best fun learning platform in the field of programming! We still have a very long way to go and with all your support we know we will be there. Without you, without your feedback all this was unachievable. We feel happy, we feel humbled, we feel confident and we feel hopeful today!

Do keep sending your feedback. We love it. Thank you.

The CodeChef Team,
Suraj Sharma, Tojo Chacko, Abhijeet Pandey and Anup Kalbalia.