Hi guys,

Our February challenge has finally ended and here are the winners!

India:

1. Tasnim Khan - Rs. 10000
2. Yash - Rs. 7000
3. Kunal Jain - Rs. 5000
4. Gaurav Agarwal - Rs. 4000
5. Imran - Rs. 3000
5. Surendra - Rs. 3000
7. Harish Narware - Rs. 2500
8. Abhijith Reddy - Rs. 2500
9. Rishikesh Dwivedi - Rs. 2500
10. Anil Kishore - Rs. 2500
11. Praveen SP - Rs. 1500
12. Shubham Mathur - Rs. 1500
12. Anshuman Singh - Rs. 1500
14. Pankaj - Rs. 1500
15. Uday Jalan - Rs. 1500
16. Deepak Pandey - Rs. 1000
17. Chitradeep Dutta Roy - Rs. 1000
18. Piyush Sachdeva - Rs. 1000
19. Balajiganapathi - Rs. 1000
20. Nadeem Moidu - Rs. 1000

Global:
1. Mark Greve - $440
2. Tomasz Czajka - $275
3. David Stolp - $220
4. Josh Metzler - $110
5. Stephen Merriman - $55

Fun Facts for this contest:

• This contest has had the highest number of unique participants to date!
• Nine of the top ten Indian scorers are either from IIIT, Allahabad or IIIT, Hyderabad while 8th place holder Abhijith Reddy is from BITS Pilani Goa.
• Mark Greve, February’s Programmer of the Month also ranked 1st in the February challenge. Congratulations!

Contest Statistics:

Congratulations to all the winners of this month’s challenge and thank you all for participating.

As always, we would love to hear your suggestions and feedback to help make this site better. If there’s anything you would like us to know, do drop in an email at feedback@codechef.com .

Cheers,
Basil

Hello fellow Codecheffers,

Congratulations to all the winners of our first monthly challenge this year and thank you to everyone that participated. The winners for this month’s challenge are :

India:
1. Ajay Somani - Rs. 22000
2. Ashutosh Mehra - Rs. 13750
3. Anshuman Singh - Rs. 11000
4. Pratik Tandel - Rs. 5500
5. Yash - Rs. 2750

Global:
1. David Stolp - $440
2. Stephen Merriman - $275
3. Josh Metzler - $220
4. Max - $110
5. Tomasz Czajka - $55

Fun Facts for this contest:

• The top scorer for the challenge problem changed quite a few times. triplem, pr0ton and innocentboy were all contenders for the spot by the end of the contest.
• Pieguy got the top score for the challenge problem with only 7 submissions! This is also his first contest win. Congratulations to you!
• Its the first time we’ve crossed 9000 submissions for a monthly contest!
• Ajay Somani got his 3rd win in a row and user seda has made his first entry into the top 10. Congratulations guys!

Contest Statistics:

Upcoming Contests:

We will be having a team based contest on 24th of January with the 8 problems from the Snackdown final. It will be a 5 hour contest that starts at 21:30 Indian Standard Time. Since CodeChef users (our snackdown finalists) have already had a chance to see these problems, we will not be having prizes for this contest. You will be able to register for the contest here, and the contest will be available at: http://www.codechef.com/SNONLINE/.

As always, we would love to hear your suggestions and feedback to help make this site better. If there’s anything you would like us to know, do drop in an email to feedback@codechef.com .

Cheers,
Basil

On January 10th 2010, we at CodeChef witnessed the most awesome teams from campuses all over India battle it out in person at the Mumbai headquarters of Directi. 639 teams of three each, had registered for the CodeChef Campus SnackDown, a two round ACM ICPC styled coding contest. The first round of the SnackDown took place on 21st November 2009. We then flew the top 7 teams from various corners of India to prove their mettle.

The 21 finalists met on 9th January for a pre-event dinner on the night before the contest finals. Here they got a chance to interact with each other, meet Bhavin (CEO of Directi) and mingle with other personnel from Directi.

Good food, interesting conversations and some fun laughs turned the dinner into a fun filled night!

The next morning at 9:30 AM teams met at the DirectiPlex with more food, some table tennis and of course, a 4 hour final on site round of the SnackDown to look forward to!

And now finally, after multiple rounds, tiresome travel and sleepless nights, we present to you the CodeChef Campus SnackDown Winners!

1st Place: Dream - IIIT Hyderabad

Bhavin and Amit with Yash Kumar (18yrs), Nadeem Moidu (20yrs), and Kunal Jain (19yrs)

Dream is an example of national integration; hailing from Rajasthan, Kerala and Chhattisgarh, these three young programmers met at IIIT Hyderabad. Inspired by their Seniors – The Kings Gambit, they formed their own team - Dream and went on to win the SnackDown!

2nd place: Phoenix - DJ Sanghvi, Mumbai

Ramki and Bhavin with Purav Shah (20yrs), Pratik Tandel (20yrs), Krunal Manik (20yrs)

This team’s friendship goes back to school days. Having started programming in the first year of engineering, they were introduced to algorithms and contests by their friend and mentor Varun Jalan (most of you know him as syco). Under Varun’s guidance team Phoenix was formed and they are soon going to represent India at the ACM ICPC world finals in China.

3rd place: CounterGambit - NIT, Trichy

Bhavin and Yazhini with Akhil Ravidas (20yrs), Abhilash R (20yrs) and Venkatesh Basker (19yrs)

Counter Gambit is formed of three hardcore Southies. Since each of them are from completely different programming backgrounds they have their our own strengths and weaknesses. However, as a team, they are really quick in solving problems which helps them  get a head start in most contests, or so they’d like to think They too are representing India at the ACM ICPC world finals this year.

The rest of our finalists are (in order of ranking):

Team: TheKingsGambit
Institution: IIIT - Hyderabad
Team Members: Anshuman Singh (21yrs), Gaurav Agarwal (22yrs) and Rajat Goel (21yrs)

Team: BruteForce
Institution: IIITM - GwaliorTeam Members: Shilp Gupta (22yrs) Manyata Goyal (21yrs) and Vineet Chaudhary(22yrs)

Team: CKrackers
Institution: Madras Institute of Technology
Team Members: Rajesh Venkatachalam (20yrs) Rajesh Rajagopalan (20yrs) Gokulakrishnan Gopalakrishnan (20yrs)

Team: DareToCode
Institution: IIIT - Allahabad
Team Members: Imran Khan (22yrs) Surendra Kumar Meena (21yrs) and Tasnim Khan (20yrs)

We had a lot of fun with the CodeChef Campus SnackDown and would love to do something like this again. We also have some fun interviews with the rest of these teams so let us know if you want more insiders information.

Cheers,
Team CodeChef

Hey Guys,

From the 14th to the 21st of December ‘09 we had the Facebook CodeChef ‘Comment to Win’ contest. Each day we uploaded a photograph of a different CodeChef merchandise that we would give away. Participants were then asked to comment on the photograph. Every 24 hours we had a lucky draw and 5 people from among all that had commented were selected to receive the merchandise of the day. Hemant Verma was the luck winner of an iPod Touch, our merchandise for the final day!

We had a lot of fun with this contest and we hope you like the photographs we put up. The comments received were just awesome and the enthusiasm you guys showed is really appreciated!

I’m sure you’re all wondering who the man in all the photographs is. That’s Pranab Kelkar, just another friendly DirectIan who agreed to be our model for the contest. Thanks a lot buddy!

While a lot of the comments deserve a mention, here is our favourite comment for each photograph.

Day 1 Winners: Vikesh Khanna , Abhishek Kona , James Olabode Samuel , Shiv Prakash , Dezul Udani

Favourite Comment : Arup Saha
if(you = giv_me(t-shirt))
{
i = assist_U (drums);
if(chef_plays (guitar) && i_play (drums) )
bool make_great_music = 1;… See More
}
else
{
i = go_back_to ( coding ); /* and win t-shirt there!!!*/
}

Day 2 Winners: Gorrerpati Siva Prasad Reddy , Shivam Gulati , Atish Bhattacharya , Akshata Bhat , Piyush Sachdeva

Favourite Comment : Akshata Bhat
…And God said, “let there be light”, and there was a Flash (drive).

Day 3 Winners : Harshit Gangal , Ayush Saxena , Nirmal Agrawal , Deepu Joseph , Uday Deep Singh

Favourite Comment : Rohan Tahiliani
The (Byteland) Saints :
Oh, when the Chefs, start cooking code ; Oh, when the Chefs start cooking code
How I want 2 be in that T-Shirt ; When the Chefs start cooking code
And when the Hats, begin to fly ; And when the Hats begin to fly
How I want to be in that T-Shirt ; When the Hats begin to fly

Day 4 Winners : Pradeep Nayak , Kushagra Gour , Rajat Kansal , Vimalkumar Jeyakumar , Jayakrishnan Nair

Favourite Comment : Ankush Gupta
A famous saying goes like,that “Books are the man’s best friends”. Certainly that’s very true and evident from the pic The power in the written word (speciallty algorithms!) is so immense that it makes the chef sleepy most of the time. Mark Twain has rightly said : Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Our winner of the iPod Touch for Day 5 of the contest : Hemant Verma

Favourite Comment : Abhi Arya Bhat
boy: (serious) i love you.
gal: (laughs) hahahahha…!! lol… omg..!! hehe…!!
boy: (serious) i’ve iTOUCH…
gal: (serious) i love u too
end of story…!!
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

While the contest has ended, the fun does not need to end there. Post on our Facebook FanPage wall and let us know what other activities you would like us to have. We would love to get feedback for this contest as well. So let us know what you think.

Our fanpage is as much yours as it is ours so feel free to use it!

Cheers,
Basil

Hello everyone,

The Re-Snackdown online round is over and we have decided to fly down the top 7 teams for the on-site finals. The finals will be held at our headquarters in Mumbai - Directiplex,  on January 10, 2010. The teams which will battle it out in the finals are : TheKingsGambit, DareToCode, BruteForce, CounterGambit, phoenix, Dream and Ckrackers.

Teams 8-20 will get the cash prizes as previously announced. Please check this link for more information about the prize structure. Teams 8-20 in order are : anshulgoyal, Blitzkrieg, ARP_Poison, idleheads, fighters, M_block, BackBenchers, Continuum, Jaspal_Siddarth_Ashish, fighter, Monty_and_his_GF, random and ramthegreatcv. Congratulations to all the teams who made it to the top 20. We will contact you soon.

As mentioned previously, here is a special mention of the best team from each college and their global rank.

The teams Astein, Daemons and double_s deserve a special mention for featuring in the Global top 10.

If you have any kind of feedback related to this contest or otherwise, feel free to comment on this blog post or contact us at admin@codechef.com. Happy Holidays.

Regards,

Aniruddha.

Hello Codechef-ers,

A big thank you to all those who participated in this month’s contest and congratulations to all the winners. This was our first truly global contest and we are more than happy with the response.  The winners for this month are :

India:
1. Ajay Somani - Rs. 22000
2. Akhil Ravidas - Rs. 13750
3. Imran - Rs. 11000
4. Surendra - Rs. 5500
5. Rajat Kansal - Rs. 2750

Global:
1. Tomasz Czajka - $440
2. pieguy- $275
3. Josh Metzler - $220
4. Renat Mullakhanov - $110
5. Zhujiaye- $55

Fun Facts for this contest:

• Second first place finish in a row for Ajay Somani.
• Tomek jumped from out of the top 10 to first place in the last hour of the contest. A splendid performance by him.
• Quite a few new faces like gaurav, melchi and V.R. Devarapally in the top 10 list for India.

Contest Statistics:

Test Cases:
Test cases for the December contest can be found here. The solutions for the contest are now public.

Upcoming Contests:

We have a Re-Snackdown contest coming up soon. For details, please check http://blog.codechef.com/2009/11/23/re-snackdown-december-20th-4-7pm/ . Another contest open to students as well as professionals is in the works, so stay tuned.

We have been trying our best to optimize the performance of the website, but certain architectural issues prevent us from making full use of our processing power. We are finding work-arounds to fix these issues so there might be times when some of you find weird errors popping up on your pages. Please report these errors to admin@codechef.com.

Please let us know what you thought of this contest and any other suggestions to improve the site.

Happy holidays.

Cheers,
Aniruddha

ChocoBananas,

In our previous 10 day algorithm challenges we’ve offered prizes to the top 5 participants from India and the top 5 participants from the US.  We’ve seen a lot of participation from international participants and are now deciding to expand our prizes to this set of awesome folks .  Starting in the December contest, everyone is eligible for prizes: the top 5 users in India and the top 5 users globally.

Enjoy,

Amit

Snackdowners,
We understand that there were some problems with the contest this weekend.  For those who missed it:

• Despite a few days of frantic optimizing, we still experienced some issues in the first half hour of the contest due to heavy load on the server (about 300 teams registered in the last 3 days - doubling our expected amount).  There were multiple complaints of people not being able to access the site at the contest’s kickoff.
• The test data and the sample input/output was wrong for the problem SUM12.  Some of you figured out our mistake and were able to still get the solution accepted… well done.  For others, this seemingly easy problem led to a lot of frustration.

We’ve evaluated all the options and here’s what we are going to do (brace yourself)… Re-Snackdown: Sunday December 20th 4-7pm - only teams who solved at least 1 problem in the original Snackdown are eligible for the finals/prize money.  Some of you are screaming at your monitors (especially those in the current top 5)…this isn’t fair… we hear you but there is no way to make everyone happy.  We screwed up, we’re sorry.   Here’s the other options and an explanation of why we are taking this approach:

• Do nothing - Everyone had access to the same set of questions, good or bad, 7 teams were able to solve three problems.  Invite them all to the finals.  We almost did this, the reason why this doesn’t work is mainly the placement of people from 7-20.  A lot of people solved 2 problems, and since we are giving out money, it depends how long you spent on and how many wrong answers you submitted for SUM12.  Didn’t seem fair to distribute money based on this.
• Rejudge SUM12 with the correct test data and eliminate penalties for this problem - While this approach seems logical at first, it doesn’t help the people who spent a lot of time on this problem.  We’re still stuck with the same issue as above (doing nothing) except add to that the complication of multiple people now having solved three problems.  We think a lot of people will end up not liking the results.
• Re-Snackdown - We considered leaving it open to anyone, or allowing anyone who solved a problem or attempted SUM12 to participate.  We are limiting it to those who solved one problem and treating this like an elimination round.  This may seem unfair to those who spent all their time attempting SUM12 (without solving any other problems correctly).  We believe that there were enough comments to indicate there was an issue with the problem and at least one other relatively easy problem that could have been solved in the time limit.  By limiting the participants, we are also decreasing the load on the server for the next round (though we are working on fixing this).  The next contest is on a Sunday afternoon post exams (Dec 20th), and last 3 hours (4-7pm).

Some people will undoubtably feel like we should’ve taken one of the approaches listed above (especially those in the original top 5).  We’re sorry, don’t hate us… feel free to comment and let us know what you think… try to be nice.

Amit

Hello,
Since the CodeChef Snackdown is the first time we are holding a team based competition, we wanted to make sure that everyone is comfortable with the new team based format and also that everything is working fine on our end. Because of this, we have planned a practice run this Thursday, 19th November from 20:00 IST to 22:00 IST. The rules and format are the same as the Snackdown.

You need to visit the contest landing page and click on the registration link provided at the bottom of the page. You will have to register a new team with a unique team name, but your team display name can be the same as the one for the main contest. On the day of the practice run, you can login using the credentials of your team account for the practice run and you will be able to view problems and submit. Bon Appétit!

Regards,
Aniruddha

Aloo Parathas,
Congratulations to everyone who competed in the November contest.  Winners for this month are:

India:
1. Ajay Somani - Rs. 22000
2. Anshuman Singh - Rs. 13750
3. Gaurav Agarwal - Rs. 11000
4. Yash - Rs. 5500
5. Akhil Ravidas - Rs. 2750

US:
1. Josh Metzler - $440
2. Po-Ru Loh- $275
3. Tomasz Czajka - $220
4. Balakrashnan Varadarajan - $110
5. Varun Jalan - $55

Fun Facts for this contest:

• Congratulations to Josh who not only has his first, first place but was also justified his selection of programmer of the month way to go buddy!
• Despite a consistent stay on the leaderboard, Ajay Somani has his first solo first place finish (previously he had tied for first back in April).
• Welcome to our first time top fivers - Yash and Akhil Ravidas
• Special shout out to our  Mark Greve who got another top 10 finish (his 3rd) and  zhujlaye a newcomer to the top ten.
• The top four Indian performers are all current or former IIIT Hyderabadians.
• The Best Box was our most solved contest problem of all time (244 AC)
• Help the DJ was the most solved challenge problem of all time (86 AC)
• The first time that the top 10 global participants differ by less than 0.004 points.

Contest Statistics:

Test Cases:
Test cases for the november contest can be found here.

Upcoming Contests:
In case you missed it check out the CodeChef Snackdown taking place on Nov 21st. This is really exciting for us, not only because its our first ever team competitions but we will also be hosting an onsite finals for the top teams of Indian college students.

We are planning another team competition open to students and professionals globally. Dates haven’t been finalized but stay tuned for more details.

Please let us know what you thought of this contest, and if you have any ideas on how we can make the site better.

Cheers,
Amit