Another master stroke from Gennady.

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.