A women’s special long challenge

On the occasion of International Women’s Day on Sunday, March 8, 2015 we decided to honor the achievement and contribution of the women in our community with special prizes for them. And it gives us immense gratification to announce that we saw rather inspiring performances from them. So, it wouldn’t be a hyperbole to say that you might be competing with the next Adele Goldbergs, Grace Hoppers or Ada Lovelace all this time.

While the Women’s Day gave us an opportunity to celebrate the women in programming, the colorful festival of Holi added few more colors to the problem set of Lalit Kundu, Sunny Aggarwal, Fedor Korobeinikov, Snigdha Chandan, Sergey Nagin, Gaoyuan Chen, Praveen Dhinwa, Chandan Boruah, Vasia Antoniuk, and Sergey Kulik. With that decorated problem setting panel, the colorful fest of March Challenge was ready for the serving. The problems were tested contest ready by the CodeChef veteran Hiroto Sekido, who has enough long contests under his belt to know what, keeps them beguiling all through the course. And it became apparent, well within the first few minutes of the contest.

More often than not, it’s the flurry of accepted submissions that opens up our Long Challenges. However, it was different this time around. The initial few submissions were not lucky enough to see the green tick of happiness. However, after a series of WA on SEAPROAR, QCHEF, and SIGNWAVE, the participants found some solace in DEVCLASS, which was the first one of the problems to receive an accepted submission. The deceiving difficulty level of the problem set kept the participants pulling their hairs in hunt of accepted solutions. However, it became a tad easy as we moved into the contest.

The first submission from the women participant came into the latter stages of the contest when taube cracked CNOTE. Soon we had ihere1, and chonp climbing their way up the rank tables by cracking the problems one by one. The more impressive of the two was ihere1, who solved 7 problems on the trot and shared the second place on the rank table with taube. However, when the clock stopped on the March Challenge 2015 it was chonp, sitting atop the rank table.

Now, let us introduce you to all our winners from the March Challenge 2015.

Firstly and rightfully so, let’s honor the women programmer. The top ten women programmers are:

• chonp
• taube
• ihere1
• hiwang123
• suruchicoder
• bhawnamait
• gabig
• fenwick_t
• foraml

And now let’s meet the gentlemen gracing the non-Indian top 10 table:

• kutengine
• msm1993
• rns4
• mugurelionut
• argos
• atetubou
• lebron
• notimesea
• enrevol
• wangyisong1996

Now, the Indian top 20:

• xorfire
• wodahs_cc
• akash4983
• pushkarmishra
• abhishek1995
• amitsaharana
• tristana
• diptesh1ce3
• rajat1603
• rednivrug15
• anuj95
• andbluer
• grebnesieh
• thunderking
• usaxena95
• hrishikesh123
• achiever202
• wrong_turn
• dudechandan123
• tapan0007

Now, we move towards our young friends in schools.

We start with the top five non-Indian school participants:

• wangyisong1996 of Hangzhou Xuejun High School Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
• enesoncu of Fatih College, Turkey
• sansirowaltz of High School Affiliated to Nanjing Normal University Nanjing, China
• mxh1999 of Zhenhai High School, China
• xllend3 of Zhenhai High School, China

Time to meet our our Indian top five:

• rajat1603 of Delhi Public School, Dwarka
• animesh_f of La Martiniere for Boys, Calcutta
• sampritipanda of Sai International School, Orissa
• additya1998 of Delhi Public School, Dwarka
• bhardwaj_75 of Dr. K.P. Sonkar High School Manduadih, Varanasi

And finally, our special achievers with highest scores for challenge problem EMBED:

The non-Indian top three:

• mappinator
• odule
• yowa

None of our Indian participants were able to crack EMBED, so the goodies for Indian top three scores for the problem goes unclaimed. We do not like that.

A big round of applause to all our winners on their brilliant performance in the contest and to all you wonderful participants for being part of the March Challenge 2015!

The March Challenge 2015 will always hold a special place in our history books, for it gave us the opportunity to celebrate the achievements of women in programming. And we are sure that we will see many more women programmers joining in the community and carving their names among the finest programmers across the globe.

If you have had a tough time battling the problem set, you might want to go through the editorials from Kevin Charles Atienza. They will help you clear your doubts about the problems and help you prepare for many such coming contests on CodeChef. And we are sure you already would have gone through them, but if you have not, let us take you through them.

• Editorials – March Challenge 2015

The April Challenge 2015 is on the door. So without any further details we would conclude this blog post in anticipation of an even more exciting long challenge ahead and many more new names to cheer for. We hope you all are ready for the challenge.

If you have any query or concerns for us, you can always send them our ways at: [email protected]

Or can call us at: (022) – 30797709

See you all at the contests.

Regards,
Rudreshwar,
Team CodeChef