It’s half century for CodeChef. Yay!

3 min read

We have had two Cook-Off after it, but it will be an injustice if we let go our 50th Anniversary blog post in a hum drum way. We know it is going to be tough to keep you all excited about something that happened a couple of months back, but still we will try and make good use of our prerogative of telling the story, while keeping it short and crisp.

With September Cook-Off 2014 we were hosting our 50th Cook-Off and it might sound cliched, but it only felt as if we had started yesterday. From the first Cook-off on July 24, 2010 to the 50th Cook-Off on September 21st, 2014, our Cook-Off has came a long way. Be it the number of participants, number of problems, or the names on the rank tables, we have seen noticeable changes in all of them. However, not everything has changed with time, some things are still the same, like the name gennady.korotkevich topping the rank tables most of the times he is in the contest.

All through this journey, we have seen some prolific programmers from across the world battling it out in the 2.5 hrs duration of the contest and many new names joining them atop the rank tables. Names like anton_lunyov, KADR, balakrishnan_v, rudradevbasak, djdolls to uwi, kutengine, mugurelionut, rubanenko, adurysk, balajiganapath became the face of our Cook-Offs and every time we set our eye on one to watch out for, we had a new one popping around the corner. But that is the beauty of sports programming, isn’t it? Rarely do you see someone cementing their place atop the rank charts for long time. However, the greatest thing that we achieved during all those Cook-Offs was the contribution from some of the finest programmers across the globe towards the community and we will always treasure that. Be it Anton helping punctiliously to the chefs and the users alike or be it the mystery surrounding djdolls, we have had some wonderful times and with you all around the happy times will keep rolling in.

Amid all those enchanting memories, we do have some forgettable ones too. And even though they are not many, it is only fair to give them their due respect, because if it wasn’t for them, we would not have been where we are today. From all the server crashes to the constant battle with the rapidly increasing plagiarism cases, all of them have been a learning lesson for us. It is only when you overcome your demons you achieve greater things in life. We believe that while we have got over some, there are many more waiting in the corridor of future, but with you all by our side, we are sure we will surmount them all.

With that, we now move towards our main event and that is the September Cook-Off 2014. Being our 50th Cook-Off it already special for all of us and to make the celebrations more august we made it the first Mega Warm Up for ACM ICPC 2014 – 2015. It meant that we will be reimbursing the ACM-ICPC expenses of the top 100 Indian students. We later decided to increase that number to 125 with our October Cook-Off 2014, in which we reimbursed the ACM ICPC expense of 25 new names in the top 100. We have already announced the list of all the eligible participants here. The ACM ICPC regionals are underway, so wish you all the best.

The problem set for the COOK50 came from Lalit Kundu, who is experienced enough to understand what exactly the participants need ahead of the ICPC regionals and thus prepared the problem set accordingly. The testing of the problem set was handled by Tasnim Imran Sunny, who affirmed the problems to be contest ready. The spice of translations came from Minako Kojima & Gedi Zheng providing the Mandarin translations and Sergey Kulik providing the Russian translations. The final course of delicious editorials came from Devendra Agarawal.

With ACM ICPC regionals just around the corner we were expecting a rush of participants during the opening few moments of the contest, and hence were wary of its consequences. But things went pretty well and the contest had a smooth start. And after that things just kept on going better and better, with the constant rise in number of submissions, number or participants and the growing competition to emerge atop the rank tables. Participants this time around were not only competing to be on the rank tables, this time the fight was to strengthen the preparations for ICPC and to be among the top 100 at least. And we were thoroughly enjoying the Cook-Off with so much competition.

Now, let us walk you through to the rank tables for our COOK50 –

We start with the non-Indian top 10:

And now the Indian top 5:

A big round of applause for our anniversary winners and for everyone making it such a huge success.

Here are the final stats of the COOK50:

  • Total Users: 2784
  • Total Submissions: 13731
  • Number of distinct users with correct submissions: 1936
  • Total users from India: 2509
  • Total users not from India: 275

With those staggering stats, the September Cook-Off 2014 makes its place right in the top of the Cook-Offs with maximum participation and there could not have been any better gift than this for our anniversary. And we have all of you to thank. So, Thank You.

The desert for our anniversary Cook-Off in the delicious editorials is already up and been savored by many, if you have not got a chance to try them on, we suggest you do that now. They are good.

With that we draw curtains on our anniversary Cook-Off blog post.  But not before thanking you all for being with us all through this wonderful journey and we hope to find you by our always. We regret for being so late in putting up this post, but we are working on our watches and will fix them to run on time soon.

As always do send in your feedback, suggestion, and queries to us at [email protected]. We love reading them all, and if you have any anniversary poems for us, send them too.

You can also sing them to us at: (022) – 30797709

That will be all from us.

See you all at the contests.

Regards,
Rudreshwar
Team CodeChef

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