Hi guys,

The August 2010 CookOff, our second short contest format has come to a very exciting end. We’ve seen some superb competition in this contest with our first accepted solution coming in less than 5 minutes! Our five course meal has now been fully devoured and we hope you all enjoyed it!

First and foremost we would like to extend our appreciation and gratitude to our cooks for the night, Zac Friggstad and David Stolp, our extremely talented problem setter, tester and moderators. You guys did an awesome job!

For all those wondering what a cupcake baking tin is, here’s a picture.
And here’s a quote by Pieguy himself:
“A cupcake baking tin is a large piece of metal with a number of round indentations that can hold batter.  When filled with batter and placed in an appropriately hot oven for an appropriate amount of time, a delicious treat emerges, which is cooled and often covered with frosting before serving (and makes a far better treat than muffins).
Of course, no picture could describe some of the non-planar monstrosities in the test cases.”

Here are the top 20 best performers of the August Cook-Off:

1. Tomek Czajka
2. ChenGaoyuan
3. Oleg
4. Ivan Mistreanu
5. Egor Kulikov
6. Tanaeem
7. Venkatesh
8. Mark Greve
9. Iqram Mahmud
10. Kungfu Panda
11. Stepan Palamarchuk
12. Seyed Hamed Valizadeh Toosi
13. Niyaz Nigmatullin
14. Tomaz Hocevar
15. Anton Lunyov
16. Tasnim Imran Sunny
17. Arijit Banerjee
18. Nikolay Kurtov
19. Anil Kishore
20. Carlos Joa

Take a look at the contest rankings here: http://www.codechef.com/rankings/COOK02

At the end of the contest the total submissions are as follows:

1) Arranging the Appetizers:  140 successful submissions

2) Backup Functions: 6 successful submissions

3) Baking Cupcakes: 6 successful submissions

4) Cleaning Up: 172 successful submissions

5) Fetching Cooking Tools: 36 successful submissions

Contest Statistics:

Congratulations guys! We look forward to seeing all of you participating in the September 2010 Challenge that starts in only 10 days.

Check out the contest problem editorials here.

We say this time and again, and we’re saying this once again. We really value your feedback so if there is anything you would like to let us know regarding this contest then do let us know by either commenting below this blog post or by sending in an email to feedback@codechef.com.

Cheers,
Basil

P.S. Winners of the contest will be contacted on Tuesday (24th August).

Hi guys,

The August 2010 Challenge has come to an end and we’ve had a lot of ties this time!

Here are the Top 20 Indian and the top 10 Global winners that we feel are eligible for prize money.

India:

01. Rajiv Kumar Aggarwal - Rs.10000
02. Nadeem Moidu - Rs.7000
03. Subrahmanyam Velaga - Rs.5000
04. vikas - Rs.4000
05. Purav - Rs.3500
06. Imran Khan - Rs.2500
07. Akhil Ravidas - Rs.2500
08. Pradeep George Mathias - Rs.2500
09. Abhijith Reddy D - Rs.2500
10. Anil Kishore - Rs.2500
11. Pulkit - Rs.1500
12. Chetan Suresh Bademi - Rs.1400
12. ikal - Rs. 1400
12. Keshav Dhandhania - Rs. 1400
12. Vaibhav Shankar - Rs. 1400
12. ishani parekh - Rs.1400
17. Srijan Bhatnagar - Rs.1000
18. Akangsha - Rs.1000
19. Saransh Bansal - Rs.1000
20. Gunjan Sharma - Rs.1000

Global:

01. Anton Lunyov - $100
01. Balakrishnan Varadarajan - $100
01. Burdakov Daniel - $100
01. Dmytro Dzhulgakov - $100
01. forest - $100
01. Gennady Korotkevich - $100
01. Mark Greve - $100
01. Oleg - $100
01. Tomek Czajka - $100
01. Stephen Merriman - $100
01. zhuxian - $100

Contest Statistics:

Congratulations to all of you that won this month’s competition and all the best to everybody for the August Cook – Off which takes place at 21:30 IST on the 21st August.

Check out the editorials to this month’s contest here.

If there is anything that you would like to let us know then do comment on this blog post or send in an email to feedback@codechef.com

Cheers,
Basil

P.S. Winners will be contacted shortly.

Hey CodeCheffers!

Hope you guys liked our inaugural CodeChef Cook-Off. As we had mentioned, we’re experimenting with the short contest format. Based on the encouraging results of last month’s contest, we’re back with a second Cook-Off this month. What’s more is that our contest will have a brand new format this time.

Unlike last month, we will be having 5 problems in the Cook-Off.

• Appetizer
• Soup
• Salad
• Main Course
• Dessert

We’ll release the problems at 9:30 pm (Indian Standard Time) on August 21st and accept answers until 12:00 am (IST) on August 22nd.

Once again, we’ll be giving away CodeChef t-shirts to the top 20 contestants globally.

We appreciate your contribution towards the growth and quality of our contests and encourage you to participate, comment and send us your feedback. Based on the feedback we will decide on the direction of future contests going forward.

Once again, it’s time to get into the kitchen and start cooking!

The August Cook-Off:

• Saturday, 21st August
• 9:30 pm to 12:00 am (Indian Standard)
• 5 Problems

Good Luck!

Cheers,
Team CodeChef

Hi guys,

Yes its been a long time coming and its finally here.

The July 2010 Challenge was once again marred by some unfortunate incidents that has made picking the winners of this contest once again quite a challenge.

A few cases of obvious cheating have been recognized and the concerned individuals have been removed from the winners list. If you feel you have been wrongly accused then please contact us by sending in an email to feedback@codechef.com.

Here are the Top 20 Indian and the top 10 Global winners that we feel are eligible for prize money.

India:

01. Namit D. Shetty - Rs.10000
02. Ankul Garg - Rs.7000
03. Rishikesh Dwivedi - Rs.5000
04. Yash - Rs.4000
05. Surendra Kumar Meena - Rs.3500
06. Vikas - Rs.2500
07. Divyanshu - Rs.2500
08. Sumeet - Rs.2500
09. Ikal - Rs.2500
10. Mahesh Chandra Sharma - Rs.2500
11. Balajiganapathi - Rs.1500
12. Amit Karmakar - Rs.1500
13. Saransh Bansal - Rs.1500
14. Kunal Jain - Rs.1500
15. Anil Kishore - Rs.1500
16. Ravi Villuri - Rs.1000
17. Ravi Kiran - Rs.1000
17. Tasnim khan - Rs.1000
19. Vimal poonia - Rs.1000
20. Abhijith Reddy D - Rs.1000

Global:

01. Tomasz Czajka - $300
02. Gennady Korotkevich - $225
03. ChenGaoyuan - $150
04. Dmytro Dzhulgakov - $100
05. Oleg - $75
06. Anton Lunyov - $50
07. Adrian Kuegel - $50
08. Tao Zhao - $50
09. Tanaeem - $50
10. Mark Greve - $50

Congratulations to all of you that won this month and all the best to everybody for the next competition which begins in only 3 days!

If there is anything that you would like to let us know then do comment on this blog post or send in an email to feedback@codechef.com

Cheers,
Basil

P.S. Winners will be contacted shortly.

Hi guys,

The July 2010 Cook-Off, our first ever attempt at a short contest format has now successfully come to an end. This was quite an exciting moment for us and we hope you all had as much fun with it as we did. Successful submissions to the contest started to pour in, in under 30 minutes, proving that we have some highly skilled coders participating on CodeChef.

BLOG POST UPDATE:

Here are the top 20 best performers of the Cook-Off:

1. Gennady Korotkevich
2. Anton Lunyov
3. Balrog
4. Alex
5. Yaroslav Tverdokhlib
6. Wu Yin
7. Takuya Akiba
8. Mayorov Mikhail
9. Mike Mirzayanov
10. Ruslan Gatin
11. Tanaeem
12. Ivan Mistreanu
13. Yash
14. Balakrishnan Varadarajan
15. Burdakov Daniel
16. Rahul Gulati
17. Jaindson Valentim Santana
18. Evgeni
19. Namit D. Shetty
20. Efime

Take a look at the contest rankings here: http://www.codechef.com/rankings/COOK01

At the end of the contest the total submissions are as follows:

1) Head Office Building:  10 successful submissions

2) Ripple-Carry Adder: 18 successful submissions

3) The Black and White Knights: 40 successful submissions

Contest Statistics:

Congratulations to all of you and thank you all for participating. This short contest format is an experiment that we are running so we would really appreciate all the feedback you can get. if you would like us to have more contests in this format in the future then please let us know.

We would also like to show our appreciation for our contest moderators, problem setters and tester. David Stolp, AnhDQ, Zac Friggstad and Varun Jalan, thank you for all the help in running a smooth contest.

Make sure you all check out the contest problem editorials here.

Winners of the contest will be contacted on Monday.

Cheers,
Basil

Dear Codecheffers,

We created CodeChef to encourage you improve your programming skills. Competing and interacting with programmers all over the world is an exciting way to get better. After finishing a contest, it’s fascinating to compare your work with others. Doing so helps you learn how to make your code better in the future. On the other hand, copying someone else’s work teaches you next to nothing.

That’s why it’s so disheartening to find out that one of our contest participants has been publishing answers before the contests are over. In addition, this programmer has put up instructions for how to mask your answers. Actions like these undermine the integrity of our contests. Not only do they make CodeChef unfair, but they make contests less fun.

The participant who’s giving away the answers, “Stefan Kyznetsov,” apparently thinks that all code should be open source — even our contests. However, “open source” does not mean the same as “Piracy.” While touting “open source,” Stefan is actually promoting plagiarism.

Furthermore, he is attempting to discourage people from learning by participating in contests. He doesn’t think that people can or should learn by solving problems. He thinks our contest prizes are a waste of money. He feels that by “hiding” our code for 10 days before we reveal our solution, we oppose the very concept of open source. How he has come to this last conclusion is beyond us. CodeChef is a not-for-profit, educational organization designed to challenge people to get better at programming. Our platform is free and open to anyone in the world.

We know there are lots of you out there who love CodeChef. If you’re game, we strongly encourage all of you to help us solve this problem.

Here’s our first step:

Tell Everyone Who Stefan Is and How to Contact Him.

If you know who Stefan is or how to contact him, let everyone know. Tell everyone his name, email addresses, chat IDs, phone numbers, IP addresses, and any other contact info you have. If you’re uncomfortable telling everyone, then just tell us anonymously by emailing feedback@codechef.com. We promise we won’t reveal your identity.

Once we know how to contact Stefan, we would ask everyone on CodeChef to explain to him why you oppose his actions.

We have some contact info about Stefan, but we’re not sure how reliable it is.

• In his last post, he mentioned that he was a math “guy from Novgorod State University”.
• Also, here is his Facebook profile: http://www.facebook.com/people/Stefan-Kyznetsov
• Additionally, he has been using this email address: team.cyclon3@gmail.com

Again, we really don’t know if “Stefan Kyznetsov” is a real name or whether any of our information about him is reliable. If you have any other solutions, we encourage you to submit them in the comments section below.

One Last Thing:

To build real software, you need to be creative, resilient, and smart. Copiers who can’t create original solutions won’t build the next generation of software. They may snatch a few dollars here and there, leeching off other people’s hard work. But they won’t get any better and they certainly won’t build anything great.

In other words, find your own solutions. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time.

Now put on your WHITE HAT and help us solve this problem!

~ Team CodeChef.

Hi guys,

The June 2010 Challenge was marred by quite a few incidents that has made picking the winners of this contest quite a challenge. Here are the Top 20 Indian and the top 10 Global winners that we feel are eligible for prize money. This list differs from our ranking table so please take a look at it carefully.

NOTE: Since Vimalkumar does not live in India, he has been shifted from the Indian Winners list to the Global Winners list. This has resulted in some modifications to our list of winners.

India:

1.  Keshav Dhandhania - Rs.10000
2.  Surendra Kumar Meena - Rs.7000
3.  Yash - Rs.5000
4.  Arunabh Trivedi - Rs.4000
5.  Ravi Kiran - Rs.3500
6.  Rajiv Kumar Aggarwal - Rs.2500
7.  Namit D. Shetty - Rs.2500
8.  rhizwanhudda - Rs.2500
9.  Saransh Bansal - Rs.2500
10. Abhijith Reddy D - Rs.2500
11. Imran Khan - Rs.1500
12. Pankaj Kumar - Rs.1500
13. Arijit Banerjee - Rs.1500
14. Rishikesh Dwivedi - Rs.1500
15. vikas - Rs.1500
16. Shrey Banga - Rs.1000
17. Deepak  - Rs.1000
18. Harish Narware - Rs.1000
19. Ritesh Srivastava - Rs.1000
20. Pratham Khandelwal - Rs.1000

Global:

1.  Mark Greve - $300
2.  Tomaz Hocevar - $225
3.  Anton Lunyov - $150
4.  Dmytro Dzhulgakov - $100
5.  Michael Dorfling - $75
6.  Chaemon - $50
7.  Trinh Tuan Phuong - $50
8.  Vimalkumar - $50
9.  Wenyu Cao - $50
10. Kyungmin Min - $50

Contest Statistics:

Congratulations to all of you that won this month and all the best to everybody for the next competition!

(Edited by Admin)

We do not encourage cheating and despise this act in every way, however, we do not like the negativity associated with branding someone a cheater either.

This blog post has been edited to remove the names of those whose code were similar to the leaked code. We are sorry if anyone may have been falsely accused. We would like to move on from this unfortunate episode and on to many more quality contests in the future.

If there is anything that you would like to let us know then do comment on this blog post or send in an email to feedback@codechef.com

Cheers,
Basil

P.S. Winners will be contacted shortly.

Hey CodeCheffers!

We’re very excited to announce 2 CodeChef contests this July!

In addition to our normal monthly contest, we’re hosting a 2.5 hour “Cook-Off” contest. The Cook-Off will include 3 problems:

• An appetizer
• A main course, and
• A dessert.

We’ll release the problems at 9:30 pm (Indian Standard Time) on July 24th and accept answers until 12:00 am (IST) on July 25th. Once we tabulate the results, we’ll award brand new CodeChef t-shirts to the top 20 contestants globally.

Why are we offering a new contest? Because you asked for it! Over the past few months, we’ve received lots of requests for shorter contests from coders, problem setters, and problem testers. In response, we brought your feedback into the kitchen and got the Chef to concoct this new contest format.

We see the Cook-Off as a new type of challenge. While our monthly contests require relentless effort and creativity, the Cook-Off demands quick thinking and sharp focus. If you think you can cook up algorithms faster and better than anyone else, we respectfully invite you to PROVE IT!

As with all first iterations, our first Cook-Off is an experiment (beta-mode). As such, we encourage you to comment and ask us questions about it. If the results are encouraging, we will consider hosting more short contests on a more frequent basis.

Now get into the kitchen and start practicing!

CodeChef  Cook-Off

• Saturday, 24th July
• 9:30 pm to 12:00 am (Indian Standard).
• 3 problems

1. One Appetizer
2. One Main Course
3. One Dessert

Cheers,
Team CodeChef

Hi guys,

Due to the inappropriate activities that so evidently took place in this months contest, we will take a few days to declare the real winners of this competition.

The solutions of the contestants will be manually checked to see if there has been any copying/modification of code. People caught cheating in this contest will not be eligible for prizes and will be banned from the upcoming contests as well.

This process will take a few days and in the mean time we would request participants to be honest about their actions in the contest so that we can reconsider the repercussions.

Regards,
Team CodeChef

P.S. Make sure you check out the editorials to this month’s contest problems here.

Hi guys,

As you all must already be aware, solutions to some of the contest problems have become publicly available. This is quite unfortunate as we have worked really hard at trying to provide you with a good contest.

While we have already banned the user from the contest and have blocked him from our FaceBook page, he has still managed to release the solutions to a large audience.

There is nothing that we can really do about this except for hope that the community takes an honest approach towards the competition and does not use the publicly available solutions. This would defeat the purpose of a fair competition and our ultimate goal, which is to increase education and the quality of programming.

Please note that since solutions to contest problems become public after the competition, users who have used the same code will not be eligible for prizes and may also be banned from future contests.

Regards,
Team CodeChef