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