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.