A very late announcement from us. Yeah, we got caught up in planning and prioritizing the features and bugs that have accumulated into a huge queue! Just to give you an idea we have over 100 pending points, that we intend to work upon in the next few months to make CodeChef a better place for all of you. But nevertheless, it should not take anything away from the rock star of our short contests, Gennady Korotkevich! We apologise for this delay in announcing this.

Gennady holds off lyrically to win the April 2012 Cook-Off. The leader of our rankings took the lead from the early stages, relinquished it in between and then came back to finish at the top!! lyrically made Gennady work harder for his win and thus deserved the 2nd place. yeputons made fantastic a Cook-Off debut to finish 3rd behind them. Congratulations guys!

The contest looked enticing from the outset as it was Anil Kishore’s problem set after a while and everyone amongst us have started enjoying Anil’s problems, haven’t we?

Gennady showcased his skill at speed after solving the first problem of the contest in under 2 minutes. He was the first one to attack BESTBATS. lyrically started his account by solving RESIST first and then attacking BESTBATS. On the other side Gennady started attacking RESIST and then moving onto PAINTING in which he wrote more than 100 lines of code in under 8 minutes!!! Whoa. More submissions began to flow for BESTBATS and RESIST. Soon the leaders had solved 3 problems out of 5 and it was up to who solves the hard problems fastest to win the contest. lyrically solved TRAINING to steal the thunder from Gennady. Gennady replied back with a submission just 5 minutes after lyrically to gain his position back. lyrically again swiftly solved TMRATING to squash Gennady’s lead in time, but Gennady was not the one to give up easily and bounced back to the top of the leader-board with another quick submission. This cemented Gennady’s and lyrically’s place in the leader-board within 1 hour of the contest! The total time difference between Gennady and lyrically was only 7 minutes in the end, considering the fact that lyrically started the contest almost 5 minutes late. Behind them the contest was still warming up with positions changing intermittently between yeputons, raveman, artem_rakhov and dzhulgakov. We did witness a very exciting contest. Our moderation panel enjoyed every minute of it

Thanks to Anil Kishore and Maxim Kolosovskiy for accepting the roles of Sous-Chefs and making the exciting dishes for our contestants to feast upon. Their hard work is shown in the fact that we received minimal number of comments for confusion in the problem statements. Lets give them a big round of applause.

The official winners of the contest are as follows:

1.) gennady.korotkevich
2.) lyrically
3.) yeputons
4.) raveman
5.) artem_rakhov
6.) dzhulgakov
7.) Romka
8.) KADR
9.) acube
10.) al13n

Congratulations guys!!

And here are the stats for the contest:

This contest was second largest in terms of participation for CodeChef Cook-Offs. Don’t get us wrong, we are not really looking to get good stats every time we host a contest but we just want you to enjoy our problems and improve your programming and algorithmic skills.

The short contest rankings again looks strong for Gennady with a lead of 1558.61 points. lyrically moves up from 36th to 10th place in Short Contest Rankings thanks to ELO!! dzhulgakov moves up to 3rd position and overtakes laycurse.

Now with the April Cook-Off done and dusted, we move towards our next long contest ‘The CodeChef May 2012 Challenge’ which will be live in another weeks time. Hope you guys have marked your calendar for the 1st of May, 2012.

Time to bid adieu. We have a long day ahead tomorrow.

Sayonnara,

Tojo,
Team CodeChef.

Hi CodeCheffers,

Since last 2 hours some of you might have faced Internal Server Error on our forum. We regret for the same and feel happy to announce that we have come up with faster forums. Now you will experience a better performance while browsing our forum

The error you faced was due to our ongoing changes on the website. Now we have successfully done the changes and you’ll no more be getting such errors. If in case any such error occurs please mail the same at feedback@codechef.com.

Abhijeet,
Team Codechef

Whoa!! What a contest !! It’s ACRush who rushed in furiously in the dying hours of the APRIL12 contest and won it with an incredible jump in his ratings. Being a “something for all”, the contest kept the participants glued to the keyboard and monitors till the very end. And we hope everyone out there had a great time during the contest.

ACRush grabbed the first position on the rank-list by getting over tomek and that too with a good difference of rating points. He surpassed skorknure and Gennady in the concluding moments of the contest. Kudos to him as he actually started this contest just 2 days before the end! skorknure and Gennady stack up behind him for 2nd and 3rd positions. Congratulations guys.

A fact worth noting is, the top 3 are the only contestants who solved all the 10 problems, with the perfect score belonging to ACRush. The best of the Indians on the leader board is shadow with a score of 7.96. Congratulations shadow.

The problems for this contest were carefully handcrafted and baked by our chefs Sergey Kulik, Kaushik Iska, Tomaž Hočevar, Shangjingbo, AnhDQ, Vitaly Herasymiv, Ishani Parekh, Vamsi Kavala and the ever reliable and a now veteran David Stolp. We welcome our new problem setters on board with this contest. Say a ‘Hi’ to Kaushik Iska and Ishani Parekh. Ishani also becomes the first female in problem setting panel on CodeChef. Hiroto Sekido cleared the niggles before the problems went public. Without him the problems could have been half-cooked. A big round of applause for them please.

Now let’s quickly glance on the slightly overwhelming statistics of this contest.

This has the best Long contest so far in the history of CodeChef in terms of participation and submissions and we hope that we only grow from here.

And now the time to announce the top placed participants.

Global:

1.) ACRush
2.) skorknure
3.) gennady.korotkevich
4.) acube
5.) zhangjiejun
6.) pperm
7.) niyaznigmatul
8.) a9108cc
9.) Oleg
10.) fmm

Indian Winners:

1.) shadow
2.) smithinsu
3.) bloops
4.) ankit_shukla
5.) gurpreet_09
6.) ashish_massand
7.) the123abhishek
8.) logic_max
9.) javadecoder
10.) djdolls
11.) calc_saransh
12.) thesoulhacker
13.) Johar
14.) akash4983
15.) bluedestroyer
16.) sharatiitr
17.) sharpie
18.) mukulgupta
19.) svm11
20.) migdal

Congratulations to each and everyone.

We had some issue with our judge system due to which some of you may had the inconvenience of getting “internal server error” quite a few times. We are happy to announce that this has been fixed now. If anybody encounters this issue from hereon please let us know.

We also made some changes to the test data of problem PLAYFIT after the contest ended. This was necessary as an additional test data was pointed out by one of our participants. We added that test data and re-judged all submissions for this problem. For those who have now got a WA for the additional test data, we apologize for the changes after the contest ended. We could not do much in this matter.

As you guys may have noticed, we introduced Flags and newly improved ratings graphs as well as the rankings page. Hope you guys like the changes. Let us know what you guys think about the changes.

As usual the time has come to end this post. We have updated our contest ranks. See, where you stand after this contest here. The editorials for the contest can be found here. We will be hosting April Cook-Off(COOK21) on the 22nd of April. We hope the problems of the Cook-Off will be as enjoyable as this contest.

See you then.

-Tojo,
Team CodeChef.

Dear CodeCheffers,

Moving with time, CodeChef has brought you many changes. This year, with us entering into our 4th year of existence, we introduced a Brand New Forum, where people can interact and share their ideas about any queries related to contests, algorithms and anything related to programming.

We also brought you the new ELO based long contest ratings and improved our long contests by increasing the number of problems and hence providing a something for all – be it a newbie or an expert.

The changes do not stop here. We are committed to giving you a good experience along with your learning. Continuing the trend, we would like to present you some UI (User Interface) changes, which, we believe will enhance your experience on the website.

Here we go with our changes -

THE FLAGS

The time has come to be on the Top. Lead globally or in your own country and bring your country flag up. Yes you got it right , now you would be able to see your country flag on the rank lists for short and long contests. Moreover you would be able to view it on your very own profile page.

THE HIGH RISE

You all must have seen the stock market going high and low. Doesn’t it build up the excitement in the buyer/seller ? So now it is your time to experience the same (and even more) level of excitement. You can see your ratings in the same way. Keep your fingers crossed at the end of each contest to see how much you have gained (lost ). Get to know about others too – how your friends fared in the last contest.

Isn’t it cool? Wait !! We still have one more cat in the bag.

Aren’t you bored of seeing your static rating graph on your profile page?  No!!! :-O That’s really nice of you But we do!

Now you can use your CodeChef handle as your IDENTITY. See your progress report in a graphical way, not only for the long contests, but also for the short one.

And no my dear friends, this time it’s not just “see”! In fact it is “play”, “download”, “print” & “use”. These graphs are not just images. You can play around with them and zoom in for a better view. Download your rating graph in 4 different formats. Print your graph and use it wherever you want to. Put them on your Facebook walls. Share them among your friends.

I hope you all will like to use these changes as much as we have loved bringing them to you. There is still a lot more to come. Stay tuned and enjoy “coding”!

And please please please do not forget to let us know how much you love us. .

With all well wishes “ta-ta”.

Abhijeet,
Team CodeChef.