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Unprecedented participation, an exciting problem set and a contest that sails by smoothly. Is there anything that we, at CodeChef, desire more? Well, not much. We do wish that the all the problems in the set were tackled and the whole platter feasted on, but more to come on that as we move on.

The feast of July Cook-Off is over now and it was a contest enjoyed by many. The chefs responsible for serving such a delectable assortment of problems are Hiroto Sekido and Maxim Kolosovskiy, our setter and tester for the Cook-Off. Helping out Maxim with additional testing responsibilities was Anton Lunyov. He provided the much needed further insights on the testing process of the problems. Incidentally Anton also happens to be our editorialist for this Cook-Off and has put in some sleepless nights into the job; something that we totally appreciate.

Thanks to the three chefs, a new record for participation for the short contests has been set and how! With 993 total users and 3592 total submissions, the numbers speak for themselves. Let us check out the stats for this contest.

We surely like what we see, but let not the stats take away the thunder from the winners of the July Cook-Off. We wholeheartedly congratulate mikhailOK for winning this short contest in style. He got a notch above everyone else by being the only one to solve CIELNUM3, with only half an hour to go for the end of the contest. That proved to be the decider of his fate and he edged his way to the first place, past yeputons who had been ruling the roost before him from the start. After that yeputons settled in for the second place. Good going! Many congratulations to both of them.

The July Cook-Off rankings remained more or less the same from the start of the contest. The leaders on the ranks showed up early and dominated the top places in the order of yeputons, mikhailOK, sereja and Fdg. EgorK, our winner of the July Challenge, appeared a little later than the others and soon settled in at the fifth place. All of them were quick to solve CIELRCPT, CIELTOMY and CIELMAP. The three problems saw numerous submissions and CIELRCPT turned out to be the first and only problem in CodeChef history to have received more than 900 submissions. It was also the first of the set to get a successful submission, by logicmachine within first three minutes of the contest!

In a way, the three mentioned problems were the levelers of the July Cook-Off.  It was the harder of the creations of Hiroto Sekido, Maxim Kolosovskiy and Anton Lunyov, CIELNUM3 and CIELBALL, that tested the mettle of everyone. Finally it was CIELNUM3 that tilted the scales in favour of mikhailOK. CIELBALL remained unsolved till last, which left us a little surprised and wondering.

The final top ten rankings are in the order of:

1.)  mikhailOK
2.)  yeputons
3.)  sereja
4.)  Fdg
5.)  EgorK
6.)  Gassa
7.)  zglicz
8.)  chaemon
9.)  ilyakor
10.) gerald

The list above is conspicuous by the absence of Gennady Korotkevich, the star of our short contests and the winner of the last four Cook-Offs. It is truly said that absence is sometimes more striking than presence, but I am sure Gennady’s absence facilitated the chances of others bagging the top spot. Don’t get us wrong; we did miss him but at the same time it was novel to see someone else win a Cook-Off for a change. Apart from Gennady, other vetrans like lyrically and KADR too gave this Cook-Off a miss. All three of them happen to be the top rank holders for the June Cook-Off. We are a little curious, but at the same time hopeful that they will be back soon.

On the home front, pulkit turns out to be the Indian placed highest at 43 in the rankings. Next is rizwanhudda at 53. Congratulations! Worth mentioning here is that the participation of Indians too has been the highest ever. With time, and practice, we hope their rankings will see a surge too.

Seems like the only thing left desirable after a satisfying meal of an intriguing problem-set are the correct answers to it. We bring to you the dessert of the day; Anton’s editorials for the July Cook-Off. Savour them and let us know your thoughts. We are eagerly looking forward to your feedback on all aspects of this short contest and everything else.

The July Cook-Off is behind us now but we are not just basking in its glory. The frantic planning for the menu of the August Long Contest is already underway and the chefs in our kitchen are working in full swing. Make sure you are at the right place on 1^st August, 2012 at 03:00 pm to meet the problem-set head on. We assure you that the coming challenge is going to be full ten days of coding fun.

Last but not the least; do flip over to the practice section to work on the problems of this Cook-Off at leisure. I know that many of you may have been disappointed at being unable to crack CIELNUM3 and CIELBALL, but the best of learning comes from the toughest of challenges. And we have never let ourselves forget that learning is central to the CodeChef philosophy.

With that I will take your leave. Looking forward to the next time I meet you at the August Challenge. Hope you are too.

Au Revoir.

-Ankita

Team CodeChef

Hello CodeCheffers,

Firstly, I would like to apologise to keep you guys waiting for this post for so long. This is indeed a very late post from us for the July 2012 Challenge. I have been under the weather for some days now and the other team members have been struggling to keep up with our daily task list. And, I finally got the opportunity today to update you guys on the happenings of the July Challenge. So without any further ado let’s begin.

The July Challenge was a smooth sailing for us and we got to the end of the contest with out any problems. We should be thanking the problem setters and tester of this contest for coming up with palatable and non-eventful problems, but we will keep that for later. Let’s first talk about the heroes of our contest. Yes, we are indeed talking about EgorK and acube . Sitting at the top of the rankings is EgorK (he is closest to Gennady in the short contest rankings). This is the first time that EgorK has won a CodeChef Long Contest! He has been very active in our short contests and also has several short contest wins to his credit. We are very happy for him. For the 2nd spot on our rankings, it is acube who has claimed the place. acube has been very consistent in our previous long contests and he was the winner of our last month’s Long Challenge. Our heartiest congratulations to both EgorK and acube for topping the leader board!

On the home front, leading the pack at the first place is guptaanil2k1. guptaanil2k1 too has participated in our earlier long contests, but this is the first time he found his way to the top among the Indians. Following him at the second place is suh_ash2008. Well done fellas! Keep it going. Also an interesting observation as far as the Indian rankings are concerned is that this time we have five different contenders for the 7th position. What more, each of them have a score of 7 too!

Time to check out the top rankers for the contest.

Global Top Ten winners:

1.) EgorK
2.) acube
3.) KADR
4.) MarioYC
5.) yeputons
6.) Oleg
7.) al13n
8.) num314
9.) watashi
10.)success

Indian Top Twenty winners:

1.) guptaanil2k1
2.) suh_ash2008
3.) balajiganapath
4.) shadow
5.) dudechandan123
6.) calc_saransh
7.) balakrishnan_v
7.) javadecoder
7.) pulkit
7.) smithinsu
7.) uniquecode
12.) prakashgayasen
13.) ccoder4u
14.) viv001
15.) slayer_x
16.) srihari
17.) niteshb
18.) jastiger
19.) sidhantgoyal
20.) mayank.punetha

As we see, the Global rank list misses our long contest veteran ACRush, who is still maintaining his lead in our long contest rank even after missing the top spot in the long contest for some time now. MarioYC has made his presence felt by coming up in the top 10 for the first time. He jumps up to 25th in the long contest rank list. Another noteworthy mention is our Ex-Programmer of the Month Oleg who came up in the top 10.

The Indian ranklist throws up some new names in the top 20. Congragulations uniquecode, ccoder4u, slayer_x, srihari, niteshb, jastiger, sidhantgoyal, mayank.punetha for coming amoung the top 20 list of Indians. Hope you guys will make your way to the top the next time.

This blog post will be incomplete without the mention of our problem setters and tester. Lets give them their due. Our problem setters for this month were Anton Lunyov, Namit Shetty, Shanjingbo, Kamran Maharov, Vitaliy Herasymiv, Nikhil Garg, Sergey Kulik, Kaushik Iska, Gennady Korotkevich, Vamsi Kavala. We also have a first time setter amongst us this time, Kamran Maharov; it is our pleasure to welcome him onboard Hope you guys enjoyed his problem DREAM. As the tester this time, we had the very experienced Hiroto Sekido working his magic on the set. Thanks to his meticulous labours, we had a mostly hassle-free contest. Together our setters and testers dished out a meal that had the CodeChef coding community licking their fingers.

Speaking of the coding community, I think a comprehensive picture of the participation stats for this Challenge is due right about now. So let’s have a look at the numbers.

We could not help but notice that the participation this time was a little less compared to the last Long Contest. We are eager to figure out the reason behind it and improve on the same as the need be. Please send us your feedback on anything and everything that you think CodeChef can improve on. I cannot iterate it enough number of times how much your feedback matters to us.

The July Long Challenge sure has ended, but at CodeChef we are not just about the contest. Each challenge brings up new points for the community, and us, to learn from. Each problem-set poses new questions. For a complete understanding of those doubts and questions pertaining to the July Challenge problem-set, check out the editorials for the same. We would like to appreciate here the efforts of our contest editorialist Nikhil Garg. Thanks to him, and the numerous busy hours he spent adding and deleting stuff after discussions with the problem setters and tester. Do let us know your thoughts on his editorials.

With that I guess I have reached the end of another exciting post. This weekend we will be hosting our short contest for the month of July. The prepartions are already underway and our problem setter and tester (Hiroto and Maxim Kolosovskiy) along with our Editorialist (Anton) are working hard to meet the deadlines. We hope the problems will be exciting and challenging for 2.5 hours of pure programming fun. In the mean time you can sweat it out over problems in our Practice Section.

It is time for goodbyes now. I will be back soon with more news from the CodeChef kitchen. Till then happy coding folks!

-Ankita
Team CodeChef