As we are about to embark into the fourth year of our journey towards providing a platform to the programming community, we are happy to bring about some long awaited changes to our contests. Not to keep you guessing, the first change is that we have added more problems to the longer version of the contest.

Over the last year we have tried hard to bring the best programmers on-board and improve the quality of our problems. I believe and I say with some audacity that we have achieved a part of that goal. We now have the support of the finest programmers from around the globe who are helping us to dish out the best quality of problems for you.

The grapevine has it, that while the quality of our contests has certainly improved, this has also resulted in the level of these contests getting a notch higher and hence there is very little that a novice programmer finds to do in our long contests. We felt that somehow in the process, we have started digressing from our original objective of making a newbie love programming rather than get intimidated. The whole idea of a 10-day contest was to provide an opportunity for every programmer to learn a concept required to solve a problem and get the gratification of solving a problem in a live contest without being bogged down by the constraints of time. Not to forget that all this had to be achieved while being competitive.

To overcome this, we are adding 4 more problems of easier levels to the existing lot of 6. Yes, that makes it 10 problems in every long contest from now on! We believe this will encourage many more novice programmers to come, participate and learn in the process. While we are excited to bring in this change, I am keeping my fingers crossed to see the reaction of people at the top, on now having to solve more number of entry level problems!

It was not a very easy decision for us to take. What this meant was more work for our problem setters, much more work for our problem tester to ensure quality of each and every problem and an increase in our monthly budget. But much more than any of this, the fact that we might be risking upsetting the best programmers to solve more number of easier problems may seem like adding noise to the contest!

However, we feel this change is something that has been awaited since quite sometime now. Hopefully the contest will now have something for everybody. And while we would like to take the credit for this change, it will be grossly unfair on my part, to our awesome problem setting panel who did all the work to help us achieve this. Kudos to all of them for some frenetic last minute effort to bring in this contest for you. Hopefully, you will like it and make our journey into the fourth year much more gratifying.

Please send in your feedback. We really love it. Do not hesitate. Come and participate. We have a few more surprises in store for you! Keep watching this space.

And please, please let us know what you think of this change.

Cheers,
Anup Kalbalia
Team CodeChef.

Yasou CodeCheffers,

We are pleased to announce that CodeChef, as a part of our Directi’s Go For Gold Initiative, will be partnering with IIT-Kanpur to bring to you IOPC 2012 programming contest. The contest is open to all and will be a team based contest. Register your respective teams by clicking on this link. Go get started!

The contest duration will be 24 hours from 14th January, 2012 1200hrs to 15th January, 2012 1200hrs.

To be eligible for prizes, the teams need to be comprised of students who are currently registered in some university only. It is not necessary that all students be from the same university. Also, you need to be registered on the Techkriti IOPC website to be eligible for the prizes. The registration for the same is here. For detailed rules of the contest checkout the contest page.

Good Luck for the contest. Hope to see you there.

Tojo,
Team CodeChef

Dear CodeCheffers!

The very first contest of the year has concluded, and we have a tie for the first seven places!

ACRush again leads the pack with the other six top place winners with him. It was a very well deserved first place for all of them. We also have 2 Indians in the Top 10 this time, with balakrishnan_v being one of the top 7!

Congratulations to all of them: ACRush, balakrishnan_v, Fdg, gennady.korotkevich, mikhailOK, triplem, wcgbg

We have a surprise in the top 7 in the form of Fdg. For all those who have been trying hard into getting into the winners list and not succeeding until now, this contest has shown up a good example. Fdg has been active on CodeChef since quite some time now and for the first time he has broken into the top 10! Our heartiest congratulations to him and hope he keeps on improving from here. We are happy to have mikhailOK make a come back to our long contest in a grand way! An interesting fact to note, he also shared the top spot in the last long contest (AUG11) that he had participated.

Now time for appreciating the efforts of those who brought this exciting contest to you. The dish was cooked by our extremely talented problem setters and a very vigilant tester, in spite of this being his first time.We had quite a few first timers in the problem setting panel as well and what a great job they did.

Sergey Kulik, Tomaz Hocevar, Nikhil Garg, David Stolp, Anton Lunyov, Vitaliy Herasymiv prepared the problems while Hiroto Sekido sampled them before they were served to you. A big applause to all of them for this effort.

Now, let us glance through the statistics and before we move on to see the final winners list.

Contest Statistics:

We observe that the participation has slightly gone down from the last time. As always, we are keenly awaiting your feedback on the quality and the level of difficulty of the problems. We will be happy to do anything that can better your experience.

And now, without any further ado, let me announce the distinct winners for the contest:

India:

1. balakrishnan_v
2. rudradevbasak
3. suh_ash2008
4. sharatiitr
5. ashish.pant
6. imagin
7. dudechandan123
8. mukulgupta
9. manishmap2
10. vaibhavabhi
11. mng88
12. calc_saransh
13. mcsharma1990
14. javadecoder
15. yash_coder
16. shettynamit
17. xyler
18. architk
19. bsrkaditya
20. manan

Rest of the World:

1. ACRush
1. Fdg
1. gennady.korotkevich
1. mikhailOK
1. triplem
1. wcgbg
7. komiya
8. skorknure
9. evgentu
10. fmm

That is all from us for now. Congratulations to all, once again.

If you haven’t yet checked out the editorials for this contest, you can do so here.

We’re running a 2.5-hour Cook-off on Sunday, 22nd of January. It begins at 2130 hrs (Indian Standard Time), so be there!

Cheers,
Team CodeChef.

Beloved CodeCheffers,

You may have been facing issue with our FB-connect button on the site. These buttons became un-responsive after Facebook updated its APIs. We have updated our code base to align with the new Facebook API and the FB-connect button should start working normally.

Please revert back to us in case of any issues. Our sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused.

-Tojo

Hey CodeCheffers,

We were reported of an anomaly in the test cases for the problem PALIN. The test cases failed to validate the submitted solutions under certain conditions and hence the solutions we getting AC. We have now updated the test cases and rejudged all successful submissions of PALIN.

Some of the successful submissions have been invalidated.

-Tojo

The site was down intermittently today at around 6:30pm(IST) due to a DOS attack. We have mitigated the issue and the site is running smoothly now.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused.

-Tojo

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The December Long Contest for 2011 has concluded, and no prizes for guessing, we have a clear winner this time. Without any need of an introduction, Tiancheng Lou leads the pack for the second consecutive time. He has figured in the top 2 for seven times in this year and finishes the year on a high taking the top slot once again! It has also been a tremendous performance from Hirose from Japan, a first appearance in the top 10. Congratulations to both of them.

The Indian rank list has 16 contestants tied at the 7th position with many new faces in the top 20! For the first time Balajiganapathi has cracked the top 2 and in what a style! The second place deserves a special mention for being occupied by the relatively unknown but very promising Archit Karandikar from IIT Indore, closely followed by Anoop Chaurasiya. As with Balaji, this is their best performance till date on CodeChef and we hope that they only improve from here. Congratulations to both of them.

Needless to say all the excitement of the contest wouldn’t have been served had the dish not been cooked so well by our extremely talented problem setters and the very vigilant tester.

AnhDQ, Gennady Korotkevitch, Hiroto Sekido and Vamsi Kavala prepared the problems while the most reliable David Stolp sampled them before they were served to you.

The statistics and the final winners list follow:

Contest Statistics:

Not withstanding the difficult problem set, the participation improved quite a bit from the last time. This is encouraging. We will still be glad to know from the community if there is anything that we can do to improve participation more. Please give us the feedback on the quality and level of difficulty of the problems.

And now, here are the distinct winners for the December contest:

India:

1. balajiganapath
2. architk
3. imagin
4. udayrocks2k8
5. anshulgoyal
6. svm11
7. ashish.pant
7. balakrishnan_v
7. bittu_it
7. crazysaikat
7. dudechandan123
7. gurpreet_09
7. javadecoder
7. Johar
7. mcsharma1990
7. mng88
7. mukulgupta
7. navinag
7. saurabhmodi102000
7. sharatiitr
7. vaibhavbahl
7. xyler

Rest of the World:

1. ACRush
2. hirosegolf
3. gawry
4. iscsi
5. binon
6. pasin30055
7. hiphip
8. shindo
9. ushsh
10. success

That is all for now. Congratulations to all, once again.

If you haven’t yet checked out the editorials for this contest, you can do so here. Do not forget to pester the problem setter with all your doubts there. Yes they will answer each one of your questions directly.

We’re running a 2.5-hour Cook-off on Sunday, the 18th of December. It begins at 2130 hrs, so be there!

Cheers,
Team CodeChef.

Dear CodeCheffers!

The November Long Contest for 2011 has concluded, and we have a tie for the first four places. And what a better sight it is to see our four veteran programmers coming back to fight and share the top position! Congratulations to Tiancheng Lou, David Stolp, Tomek Czajka and Stephen Merriman.

However, the Indian ranklist is clear of any tie and has been comprehensively won by Pradeep George Mathias, followed by Utkarsh Lath. Congratulations to both of them.

Also we see quite a few first timers in the ranking list. This is a very encouraging sign for us as well as the community and is something that makes us really happy.

The dish was cooked by our extremely talented problem setters and the very vigilant tester.

Anirban Mitra, Anton Lunyov, Ashar Fuadi, Gennady Korotkevitch, Hiroto Sekido, Saransh Bansal prepared the problems while Tolstikov Aleksey sampled them before they were served to you.

Let’s look at some Statistics and then move on to see the final winners list.

Contest Statistics:

The participation has gone down a bit from the last time. We shall be glad to know from the community why this is so and if there is anything that we can do about it. Both the average scores — for users from, and outside India — have decreased from the last time. This may be due to the increase in the difficulty of the contest’s problems. Please give us the feedback on the quality and level of difficulty of the problems.

And now, here are the distinct winners for November contest:

India:

1. pragrame
2. utkarsh_lath
3. rudradevbasak
4. pratikmoona
5. ankurgupta91
6. dudechandan123
7. shettynamit
8. smithinsu
9. sharatiitr
10. viv001
11. manishmap2
12. mendax
13. mng88
14. pradeep_chf
15. sunny816.iitr
16. svm11
17. mischievous_me
18. chandaniitr
19. psingh871
20. vaibhavbahl

Rest of the World:

1. ACRush
1. pieguy
1. tomek
1. triplem
5. EgorK
6. lyrically
7. prgobet
8. chaemon
9. pperm
10. ushsh

That is all for now. Congratulations to all, once again.

If you haven’t yet checked out the editorials for this contest, you can do so here.

We’re running a 2.5-hour Cook-off on Sunday, the 20th of November. It begins at 2130 hrs, so be there!

Cheers,
Team CodeChef.

Comrades of code!

I bring you news at this ungodly hour, for it is news worth knowing!

The October Cook-off, 2011, concluded an hour ago.

It started amidst great confusion and borderline panic, because of a lot of carelessness from our side. Problems weren’t visible, the problem statements weren’t updated, the Time Limits were messed up… I think it’s better if you don’t know too much.

For this mishap, we truly apologise. Firstly, to our problem setter and tester, Anton Lunyov and David Stolp. They penned the entire contest from scratch, and our mistakes jeopardized a good fifteen minutes of it. They are not to blame.

We’d like to thank them for what has proven to be a well-balanced set, although marginally biased again towards the mathematical spectrum of programming; sources claim our setter Mr. Lunyov likes his problems “mathy.” What do you think?

After the initial hiccups though, things at the back end stabilized, and all of us here got to witness an enjoyable latter half of the contest, as the top ranks changed a few times. We have here some screenshots that may garner your interest…

How they stood a little over an hour before the end of the contest.

Then, at 2307 hrs…

Gennady moves up to second by solving LAMQUGAM… without a penalty.

At 2313 hrs, as PERMDIG saw another successful submission…

artem_rakhov jumps into contention from 6th, just like Gennady did.

At 2325 hrs, PERMDIG saw YET ANOTHER successful submission…

Gennady solves his last problem without a penalty, takes the top spot; “what a comeback!” we exclaimed.

But, with only eight minutes to go…

EgorK reclaimed his first position with a penalty-less submission for LAMQUGAM, and deservedly took the cake.

So, as one too many penalties proved costly for Gennady, the contest drew to a close. Also, if you may have noticed above, mikhailOK managed yet another flawless submission. While scouting the top few names for plausible winners, his was the only one without any penalties. But with so little time to go, it ended at…

Notice the final submission for LAMQUGAM by KADR, who deservedly reached 7th, and our POTM laycurse, who held the record for maximum penalties in the top 10. =D

So, just as above, here are your winners:

1.  EgorK
2.  gennady.korotkevich
3.  mikhailOK
4.  artem_rakhov
5.  uwi
6.  iwiwi
7.  KADR
8.  laycurse
9.  damians
10. xcwgf666

A special mention to mikhailOK for being the only to executing a flawless competition while solving four problems. Pity you didn’t get LAMQUGAM.

The final Cook-off rankings can be viewed here.

Here are the usual statistics for the page:

The editorials for all problems can be viewed here.

Once again, sincere apologies to the problem setter and tester, and to all the participants themselves. We ask you to have faith in us. You will not be disappointed.

We hope to see you competing in the upcoming November Long Contest, which begins at 1500 hrs on the first day of the next month.

Cheers,
Adarsh Loyal,
Team CodeChef.

Fellow programmers!

This is to inform you that we have secured the cluster judging option on CodeChef; we have always received feedback about the judge’s delayed response-time, and cluster judging will now double the judge’s response speed, such that you can forget the slow judge of yesteryear. You can experience it first-hand at all our practice sections.

We’re encouraging any feedback you can give us regarding anomalies that you may come across while submitting your solutions, and we’ll fix it right away – Once we have ensured our cluster judging system is flawless, we’ll be activating it for our contests.

Therefore, if we can work together on this and work fast enough, we can employ cluster judging for this Sunday’s Cook-off.
So, let’s make this happen!