Hey CodeCheffers,

Time to flash another card from the pack. And this has been long pending. Finally we are revamping our editorials.

Yes, the editorials that we had on our wiki till now, will be on our discussion forum going forward. You can discuss all your doubts and issues regarding any problem at a single place. From the upcoming June Challenge, each and every problem will have its editorial in the form of a community wiki on discuss. You will be able to discuss all your problem related doubts under one roof and get them answered by a broader audience. The link to the problem editorial will appear on each problem page after the contest ends. During the contest, any queries pertaining to the problem can be discussed as comments on the problem page itself based on the guidelines mentioned here.

This is a part of the process to improve our editorials. We have been receiving a lot of feedback to revamp them to make them understandable to everyone including a newbie. We realized the fact that writing simple and explanatory editorials is a very important and time consuming assignment and it was too much of a burden on our problem setters to take this challenge along with the task of creating amazing problems. In spite of this burden, they have been doing a great job at it. Identifying this inadequacy in our process, we have introduced a new role that will be solely responsible for creating amazing Editorials which even an enthusiastic newbie should be able to follow and learn from. With this comes a new member in our kitchen to join the problem setters and the problem testers – the Editorialist. Read more about our editorialist here.

What this also does is add one more opportunity for you to be in our list of contributors. Those of you, who have been regular in our contests and might have got bored of winning and want to experience the exchange of stimulating algorithmic discussions, while the problems are being baked in our kitchen before they are served to the rest of the world, we now have a new role to contribute to CodeChef. If you think that you are up to it, please apply.

Also, we are looking out for problem creators who can create exciting Hard and Challenge problems for us. If you have not already applied, you can do so to contribute to CodeChef as a problem setter.

Do keep your eyes broadly open. More updates coming soon…

Warm regards,
Suraj Sharma

Hola,

First things first, the site is back online and waiting to judge your submissions We made some minor improvements to the site and it is quite visible on the problem page. The meta data section for the problem has been revamped to show only supported languages for the problem and the author of the problem as well.

Never before on CodeChef were you able to correctly guess whose problem you were solving. Now it should be quite eminent after seeing the author info.

We have also made certain changes to the problem submission page. Now the language field drop down pre-fills with supported languages for the problem.

The bug with the code editor has been fixed too. Some of you may have seen it missing from the problem submission page. That issue has been resolved and now it should be visible consistently.

Hope you find these changes useful. Do let us know what you think of them at feedback@codechef.com. We are eager to hear your take on them.

–Tojo,
Team CodeChef.

We will be taking the site offline for some code deployment at 6:00pm(IST). The site will be offline for a duration of half an hour. Please be patient and keep watching this space on what is going to come.

-Tojo,
Team CodeChef.

One of the most eventful Cook-offs in the recent history of CodeChef comes to an end with gennady once again claiming the top spot. He took an early lead in the contest and maintained it throughout almost the whole of the May Cook-off. lyrically gave gennady a stiff competition, at one time even briefly overtaking him by being the first to solve all five problems of the contest. Not to be outdone, gennady soon solved all the problems successfully and reclaimed the first position on our leader board. Congratulations to both of them! The close fight between the top 2 made for interesting end moments of the contest.

Apart from the obvious excitement over the winners, the May Cook-off was interesting from other aspects too. Fifteen minutes into the contest, we faced a syn-attack on our server. The problem was first noticed when the site pages became slow to respond. However, the good news is that the attack was soon mitigated after being detected. Things went back on track and we wiped the sweat off our brows. Phew! As a direct result of the above mentioned attack, we decided to extend the Cook-off by a good ten minutes keeping in mind the inconvenience that was caused to the participants. This, I am sure, must have come in handy to all those who were competing.

The problems for this Cook-off had been carefully conceived and brewed by Vitaliy Herasymiv. Equal credit goes to our problem tester for the contest, Anton Lunyov, who took the pains to test the problems till moments before the start of the contest to ensure their perfect taste. Without their coordination, the contest problems would have been bland and zest-less. Here’s hoping that they keep more of those coming.

The problems in this contest posed a gamut of varying difficulty levels to the participants. LUCKYSTR was the first of the five to get solved, with the first successful submission for it coming in within the first eight minutes of the contest. It was also the problem with the most successful entries, followed distantly by LUCKYBAL. Of the set, LUCKYCOM proved to be the one that had everyone’s grey cells go into overdrive. The problem only had its first successful entry twenty five minutes before the end of the competition. The guy to crack it first was lyrically followed shortly by gennady. The only other entry for it came from al13n, who just came short of solving all the five problems. Wishing him better luck for the next time. Here are the editorials of the problems for you guys to have a look at. In case of those nagging doubts, feel free to directly talk to the problem setter there.

Coming up next, the stats for the May Cook-off.

Looking at the winners of the May Cook-off, we have:

1.) gennady.korotkevich
2.) lyrically
3.) sereja
4.) mmaxio
5.) fhlasek
6.) al13n
7.) raveman
8.) subscriber
9.) watashi
10.) kenny_horror

At the ninth position on the board we have a female debutant, watashi. Congratulations to her for featuring in the Global top 10 on her first attempt at a Cook-off. We are looking forward to future participation from her. As far as the Indians go, we have balakrishnan_v at the 24th and manan at the 25th positions respectively.

Our winner of the day, gennady has been on the top of the leader board for quite some time now. With this Cook-off he jumped a healthy 767 points, widening the gap between himself and his close competitor EgorK, who decide to give the contest a miss second time in a row.   I wonder how the rankings would have changed if EgorK had made an appearance. We wish to have him back for the future Cook-offs.

As interesting as the May Cook-off was, we are looking forward to the June Long Contest. Our setters and testers are already working their magic to come up with an interesting and challenging set of problems for you. So, get excited as all will be revealed on 1st June. Till then we wait and be patient.

Don’t forget to send us your feedback. We look forward to it always. The problems from this contest are now available in the practice section for you to have a go at them.

Well, it’s time to bid adieu now. But only till the next time I say Hello! Happy coding till then.

-Ankita

Team CodeChef

Hola people! We have just come to the end of the May Long Contest, and boy! Was it one helluva challenge or what? For the first time in CodeChef history we have a winner from the land of kangaroos, Australia. Enter venuswitharms with the score of a perfect 10. I am sure it is a sweet victory for him as the May Long Contest was his third challenge ever with CodeChef. So let’s have a round of applause for the newbie.

Following close on the heels of venuswitharms, we have KADR in the second position with a score of 9.994. Congratulations! With the difference in points being so less between the top two guys, you bet the May Long Contest was an exciting one. We were left a little wondering by the absence of all our regular top ranking coders though. Then again we have a whole lot of good news to make up for that, especially from the home front.

This contest has ended, to the delight of everyone, with not one but two Indians in the Global Top 10 Rankings! Put your hands up for balakrishnan_v at the 6th position, and djdolls at the 8th. Kudos to both of them to have broken into the top rankings with the super scores of 9.965 and 9.931 respectively.

The problems that had you scratching your heads and thinking, had been tastefully whipped up by our chefs Nikhil Garg, Hiroto Sekido, Imran Sunny, Kaushik Iska, David Stolp, Vitaliy Herasymiv, Anh DQ and Ishani Parekh. They were then painstakingly tested to weed out the glitches by Subrahmanyam, the problem tester for the contest. Thanks for having our backs guys. Cheers!

I am sure a lot of you were a little taken aback on seeing only 9 problems initially. Selling Tickets was put up later on 3rd of May after we had to spend a little more time in getting it all spruced up for the contest. We appreciate the efforts of David Stolp and Subrahmanyam for seeing that one through. I hope the problem was worth the wait for the community.

OK, time to check out the stats now.

Numbers were big during this Long Contest. We saw the highest number of submissions for a contest ever with this one and, no prizes for guessing that we have big smiles pasted on all our faces.

Let’s have a look at the top placed participants now, both Global and Indian.

Global:
1.) venuswitharms
2.) KADR
3.) samansami
4.) yeputons
5.) iscsi
6.) acube
7.) pva701
8.) fierro_oxidado
9.) mr_ilchi
10.) sankear

Indian:
1.) balakrishnan_v
2.) djdolls
3.) pulkit
4.) shadow
5.) pragrame
6.) sharatiitr
7.) suh_ash2008
8.) viv001
9.) vineetonrole
10.) ardatt1155
11.) mendax
12.) kriateive
13.) svm11
14.) mukulgupta
15.) deepangupta91
15.) drakknight
15.) flying_ant
15.) guptaanil2k1
15.) loonydmad
15.) manan
15.) pikku
15.) smithinsu
15.) theone.pa1

Well, the leader board has had a couple of major changes. Due to him winning this one hands down, venuswitharms is now placed at the 5th position in the overall global rankings with a huge jump of 2043 points in our table. Sitting tight at the numero uno spot still is ACRush with a gargantuan rating of more than 6822 points. As far as the Indians are concerned balakrishnan_v seems to be soon catching up with rudradevbasak, the difference in their ratings being reduced with the May Long Contest. It will be exciting to see how things pan out over the next few contests. We can hardly wait!

I am sure that now that we are done with this one, all of you are already looking forward to the May Cookoff. Count on us to make sure that it will be an engaging one. We are trying to come up with problems even more challenging for your benefit. But you guys gotta wait till the Cookoff for those.

Feel free to drop in your suggestions that will help us make CodeChef a better place for you all. We eagerly look forward to your feedback as always.

Well, with this I come to the end of this post. We will be back with more brain-racking stuff soon. Watch this space for more!

-Ankita,

Team CodeChef