December does not seem to be a predictor-friendly month. Be it the apocalypse prediction from the Mayans or Sachin Tendulkar playing one more World Cup, nothing came true. And we are really happy about both of them, although not very sure about the latter one.

Therefore, when everyone was guessing we also had our guessing game for our December CookOff. However, just as with those foretellers, we were proved wrong by the end of the contest and this time around, we were even happier than the above two.

The delicacy of problems came from cook David Stolp, while Pradeep George Mathias, who, for the less aware is the ACM ICPC 2011-2012 world finalist and our “Go For Gold” winner, was the editorialist for this CookOff. With chills outside, the thrill for the December CookOff began right from the moment the problems were unveiled. We had our first submission on the problem MUFFINS3 inside first four minutes of the contest, which was a pleasant surprise and assured an action packed night. As the night progressed, the chill and the thrill increased, with the temperature dropping outside and the first 10 submissions getting accepted inside.

The MUFFINS3 & DIRECTI problems saw maximum submissions, while GRIDGAME proved to be the toughest problem for the contest receiving the only submission from al13n, who unfortunately ended up with only 3 problems. The beginning of contest was rather impressive with flurry of submissions pouring in and it remained that way till the end of the contest. The TREEROOT came as a surprise to many users and kept them busy for more time than expected. Overall, all the five problems were nicely set up maintaining a perfect balance & keeping the coders on their toes. By the end of the contest, we were all excited with the way the contest shaped up, which always is a nice sign.

As the contest got over, our team began the vigorous process of publishing the editorials, updating rankings, and moving the problems to the practice segment. By the time all the processes were over, we had some interesting stats at our hand. Topping the rank list, darinflar saw the biggest jump in short contest rankings with 1288 points, while ptak taking part in only his second CookOff grabbed the 3^rd position bettering his previous rank of 19^th in his debut at the COOK27. Also, our newly appointed problem setter, ballon_ziq, ranked 5^th! .

The key stats for our December CookOff 2012 are all listed below.

• Total Users: 1113
• Total Submissions: 4010
• Number of distinct users with correct submissions: 1035
• Total users from India: 874
• Total users not from India: 239

The Top Ten winners for the December CookOff are as follows:

1. darinflar
2. uwi
3. ptak
4. Ra16bit
5. ballon_ziq
6. khaustov
7. acube
8. sweiss
9. sereja
10. yeputons

December CookOff seemed just the perfect closure to an eventful year for all of us here at CodeChef. We saw some great contests, greater participation, and most importantly some awesome contributions from you all. With all those pleasing memory we bid adieu to the year 2012 and set our sails towards the new year with the January 2013 Long Challenge.

We love to hear your suggestions and feedbacks, so keep them sending our way to feedback@codechef.com.

You can check the editorials for December CookOff here.

So, that’s all from team CodeChef as for now. We wish you all Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year. Have a lovely holiday season everyone.

Rudreshwar,
Team CodeChef.

EDIT: We missed out on acknowledging the efforts of the person who was instrumental behind making this such a great contest. It was none other than Anton Lunyov, a veteran and the go to man for us in any situation. He donned the tester’s hat once again and also helped David Stolp and Pradeep Mathias to improve the problem set as well as the editorials. I apologize for the goof up as I am still getting a hang of things around me. Anton, you rock!

Unprecedented participation, an exciting problem set and a contest that sails by smoothly. Is there anything that we, at CodeChef, desire more? Well, not much. We do wish that the all the problems in the set were tackled and the whole platter feasted on, but more to come on that as we move on.

The feast of July Cook-Off is over now and it was a contest enjoyed by many. The chefs responsible for serving such a delectable assortment of problems are Hiroto Sekido and Maxim Kolosovskiy, our setter and tester for the Cook-Off. Helping out Maxim with additional testing responsibilities was Anton Lunyov. He provided the much needed further insights on the testing process of the problems. Incidentally Anton also happens to be our editorialist for this Cook-Off and has put in some sleepless nights into the job; something that we totally appreciate.

Thanks to the three chefs, a new record for participation for the short contests has been set and how! With 993 total users and 3592 total submissions, the numbers speak for themselves. Let us check out the stats for this contest.

We surely like what we see, but let not the stats take away the thunder from the winners of the July Cook-Off. We wholeheartedly congratulate mikhailOK for winning this short contest in style. He got a notch above everyone else by being the only one to solve CIELNUM3, with only half an hour to go for the end of the contest. That proved to be the decider of his fate and he edged his way to the first place, past yeputons who had been ruling the roost before him from the start. After that yeputons settled in for the second place. Good going! Many congratulations to both of them.

The July Cook-Off rankings remained more or less the same from the start of the contest. The leaders on the ranks showed up early and dominated the top places in the order of yeputons, mikhailOK, sereja and Fdg. EgorK, our winner of the July Challenge, appeared a little later than the others and soon settled in at the fifth place. All of them were quick to solve CIELRCPT, CIELTOMY and CIELMAP. The three problems saw numerous submissions and CIELRCPT turned out to be the first and only problem in CodeChef history to have received more than 900 submissions. It was also the first of the set to get a successful submission, by logicmachine within first three minutes of the contest!

In a way, the three mentioned problems were the levelers of the July Cook-Off.  It was the harder of the creations of Hiroto Sekido, Maxim Kolosovskiy and Anton Lunyov, CIELNUM3 and CIELBALL, that tested the mettle of everyone. Finally it was CIELNUM3 that tilted the scales in favour of mikhailOK. CIELBALL remained unsolved till last, which left us a little surprised and wondering.

The final top ten rankings are in the order of:

1.)  mikhailOK
2.)  yeputons
3.)  sereja
4.)  Fdg
5.)  EgorK
6.)  Gassa
7.)  zglicz
8.)  chaemon
9.)  ilyakor
10.) gerald

The list above is conspicuous by the absence of Gennady Korotkevich, the star of our short contests and the winner of the last four Cook-Offs. It is truly said that absence is sometimes more striking than presence, but I am sure Gennady’s absence facilitated the chances of others bagging the top spot. Don’t get us wrong; we did miss him but at the same time it was novel to see someone else win a Cook-Off for a change. Apart from Gennady, other vetrans like lyrically and KADR too gave this Cook-Off a miss. All three of them happen to be the top rank holders for the June Cook-Off. We are a little curious, but at the same time hopeful that they will be back soon.

On the home front, pulkit turns out to be the Indian placed highest at 43 in the rankings. Next is rizwanhudda at 53. Congratulations! Worth mentioning here is that the participation of Indians too has been the highest ever. With time, and practice, we hope their rankings will see a surge too.

Seems like the only thing left desirable after a satisfying meal of an intriguing problem-set are the correct answers to it. We bring to you the dessert of the day; Anton’s editorials for the July Cook-Off. Savour them and let us know your thoughts. We are eagerly looking forward to your feedback on all aspects of this short contest and everything else.

The July Cook-Off is behind us now but we are not just basking in its glory. The frantic planning for the menu of the August Long Contest is already underway and the chefs in our kitchen are working in full swing. Make sure you are at the right place on 1^st August, 2012 at 03:00 pm to meet the problem-set head on. We assure you that the coming challenge is going to be full ten days of coding fun.

Last but not the least; do flip over to the practice section to work on the problems of this Cook-Off at leisure. I know that many of you may have been disappointed at being unable to crack CIELNUM3 and CIELBALL, but the best of learning comes from the toughest of challenges. And we have never let ourselves forget that learning is central to the CodeChef philosophy.

With that I will take your leave. Looking forward to the next time I meet you at the August Challenge. Hope you are too.

Au Revoir.

-Ankita

Team CodeChef

One of the most eventful Cook-offs in the recent history of CodeChef comes to an end with gennady once again claiming the top spot. He took an early lead in the contest and maintained it throughout almost the whole of the May Cook-off. lyrically gave gennady a stiff competition, at one time even briefly overtaking him by being the first to solve all five problems of the contest. Not to be outdone, gennady soon solved all the problems successfully and reclaimed the first position on our leader board. Congratulations to both of them! The close fight between the top 2 made for interesting end moments of the contest.

Apart from the obvious excitement over the winners, the May Cook-off was interesting from other aspects too. Fifteen minutes into the contest, we faced a syn-attack on our server. The problem was first noticed when the site pages became slow to respond. However, the good news is that the attack was soon mitigated after being detected. Things went back on track and we wiped the sweat off our brows. Phew! As a direct result of the above mentioned attack, we decided to extend the Cook-off by a good ten minutes keeping in mind the inconvenience that was caused to the participants. This, I am sure, must have come in handy to all those who were competing.

The problems for this Cook-off had been carefully conceived and brewed by Vitaliy Herasymiv. Equal credit goes to our problem tester for the contest, Anton Lunyov, who took the pains to test the problems till moments before the start of the contest to ensure their perfect taste. Without their coordination, the contest problems would have been bland and zest-less. Here’s hoping that they keep more of those coming.

The problems in this contest posed a gamut of varying difficulty levels to the participants. LUCKYSTR was the first of the five to get solved, with the first successful submission for it coming in within the first eight minutes of the contest. It was also the problem with the most successful entries, followed distantly by LUCKYBAL. Of the set, LUCKYCOM proved to be the one that had everyone’s grey cells go into overdrive. The problem only had its first successful entry twenty five minutes before the end of the competition. The guy to crack it first was lyrically followed shortly by gennady. The only other entry for it came from al13n, who just came short of solving all the five problems. Wishing him better luck for the next time. Here are the editorials of the problems for you guys to have a look at. In case of those nagging doubts, feel free to directly talk to the problem setter there.

Coming up next, the stats for the May Cook-off.

Looking at the winners of the May Cook-off, we have:

1.) gennady.korotkevich
2.) lyrically
3.) sereja
4.) mmaxio
5.) fhlasek
6.) al13n
7.) raveman
8.) subscriber
9.) watashi
10.) kenny_horror

At the ninth position on the board we have a female debutant, watashi. Congratulations to her for featuring in the Global top 10 on her first attempt at a Cook-off. We are looking forward to future participation from her. As far as the Indians go, we have balakrishnan_v at the 24th and manan at the 25th positions respectively.

Our winner of the day, gennady has been on the top of the leader board for quite some time now. With this Cook-off he jumped a healthy 767 points, widening the gap between himself and his close competitor EgorK, who decide to give the contest a miss second time in a row.   I wonder how the rankings would have changed if EgorK had made an appearance. We wish to have him back for the future Cook-offs.

As interesting as the May Cook-off was, we are looking forward to the June Long Contest. Our setters and testers are already working their magic to come up with an interesting and challenging set of problems for you. So, get excited as all will be revealed on 1st June. Till then we wait and be patient.

Don’t forget to send us your feedback. We look forward to it always. The problems from this contest are now available in the practice section for you to have a go at them.

Well, it’s time to bid adieu now. But only till the next time I say Hello! Happy coding till then.

-Ankita

Team CodeChef

Hola people! We have just come to the end of the May Long Contest, and boy! Was it one helluva challenge or what? For the first time in CodeChef history we have a winner from the land of kangaroos, Australia. Enter venuswitharms with the score of a perfect 10. I am sure it is a sweet victory for him as the May Long Contest was his third challenge ever with CodeChef. So let’s have a round of applause for the newbie.

Following close on the heels of venuswitharms, we have KADR in the second position with a score of 9.994. Congratulations! With the difference in points being so less between the top two guys, you bet the May Long Contest was an exciting one. We were left a little wondering by the absence of all our regular top ranking coders though. Then again we have a whole lot of good news to make up for that, especially from the home front.

This contest has ended, to the delight of everyone, with not one but two Indians in the Global Top 10 Rankings! Put your hands up for balakrishnan_v at the 6th position, and djdolls at the 8th. Kudos to both of them to have broken into the top rankings with the super scores of 9.965 and 9.931 respectively.

The problems that had you scratching your heads and thinking, had been tastefully whipped up by our chefs Nikhil Garg, Hiroto Sekido, Imran Sunny, Kaushik Iska, David Stolp, Vitaliy Herasymiv, Anh DQ and Ishani Parekh. They were then painstakingly tested to weed out the glitches by Subrahmanyam, the problem tester for the contest. Thanks for having our backs guys. Cheers!

I am sure a lot of you were a little taken aback on seeing only 9 problems initially. Selling Tickets was put up later on 3rd of May after we had to spend a little more time in getting it all spruced up for the contest. We appreciate the efforts of David Stolp and Subrahmanyam for seeing that one through. I hope the problem was worth the wait for the community.

OK, time to check out the stats now.

Numbers were big during this Long Contest. We saw the highest number of submissions for a contest ever with this one and, no prizes for guessing that we have big smiles pasted on all our faces.

Let’s have a look at the top placed participants now, both Global and Indian.

Global:
1.) venuswitharms
2.) KADR
3.) samansami
4.) yeputons
5.) iscsi
6.) acube
7.) pva701
8.) fierro_oxidado
9.) mr_ilchi
10.) sankear

Indian:
1.) balakrishnan_v
2.) djdolls
3.) pulkit
4.) shadow
5.) pragrame
6.) sharatiitr
7.) suh_ash2008
8.) viv001
9.) vineetonrole
10.) ardatt1155
11.) mendax
12.) kriateive
13.) svm11
14.) mukulgupta
15.) deepangupta91
15.) drakknight
15.) flying_ant
15.) guptaanil2k1
15.) loonydmad
15.) manan
15.) pikku
15.) smithinsu
15.) theone.pa1

Well, the leader board has had a couple of major changes. Due to him winning this one hands down, venuswitharms is now placed at the 5th position in the overall global rankings with a huge jump of 2043 points in our table. Sitting tight at the numero uno spot still is ACRush with a gargantuan rating of more than 6822 points. As far as the Indians are concerned balakrishnan_v seems to be soon catching up with rudradevbasak, the difference in their ratings being reduced with the May Long Contest. It will be exciting to see how things pan out over the next few contests. We can hardly wait!

I am sure that now that we are done with this one, all of you are already looking forward to the May Cookoff. Count on us to make sure that it will be an engaging one. We are trying to come up with problems even more challenging for your benefit. But you guys gotta wait till the Cookoff for those.

Feel free to drop in your suggestions that will help us make CodeChef a better place for you all. We eagerly look forward to your feedback as always.

Well, with this I come to the end of this post. We will be back with more brain-racking stuff soon. Watch this space for more!

-Ankita,

Team CodeChef

A very late announcement from us. Yeah, we got caught up in planning and prioritizing the features and bugs that have accumulated into a huge queue! Just to give you an idea we have over 100 pending points, that we intend to work upon in the next few months to make CodeChef a better place for all of you. But nevertheless, it should not take anything away from the rock star of our short contests, Gennady Korotkevich! We apologise for this delay in announcing this.

Gennady holds off lyrically to win the April 2012 Cook-Off. The leader of our rankings took the lead from the early stages, relinquished it in between and then came back to finish at the top!! lyrically made Gennady work harder for his win and thus deserved the 2nd place. yeputons made fantastic a Cook-Off debut to finish 3rd behind them. Congratulations guys!

The contest looked enticing from the outset as it was Anil Kishore’s problem set after a while and everyone amongst us have started enjoying Anil’s problems, haven’t we?

Gennady showcased his skill at speed after solving the first problem of the contest in under 2 minutes. He was the first one to attack BESTBATS. lyrically started his account by solving RESIST first and then attacking BESTBATS. On the other side Gennady started attacking RESIST and then moving onto PAINTING in which he wrote more than 100 lines of code in under 8 minutes!!! Whoa. More submissions began to flow for BESTBATS and RESIST. Soon the leaders had solved 3 problems out of 5 and it was up to who solves the hard problems fastest to win the contest. lyrically solved TRAINING to steal the thunder from Gennady. Gennady replied back with a submission just 5 minutes after lyrically to gain his position back. lyrically again swiftly solved TMRATING to squash Gennady’s lead in time, but Gennady was not the one to give up easily and bounced back to the top of the leader-board with another quick submission. This cemented Gennady’s and lyrically’s place in the leader-board within 1 hour of the contest! The total time difference between Gennady and lyrically was only 7 minutes in the end, considering the fact that lyrically started the contest almost 5 minutes late. Behind them the contest was still warming up with positions changing intermittently between yeputons, raveman, artem_rakhov and dzhulgakov. We did witness a very exciting contest. Our moderation panel enjoyed every minute of it

Thanks to Anil Kishore and Maxim Kolosovskiy for accepting the roles of Sous-Chefs and making the exciting dishes for our contestants to feast upon. Their hard work is shown in the fact that we received minimal number of comments for confusion in the problem statements. Lets give them a big round of applause.

The official winners of the contest are as follows:

1.) gennady.korotkevich
2.) lyrically
3.) yeputons
4.) raveman
5.) artem_rakhov
6.) dzhulgakov
7.) Romka
8.) KADR
9.) acube
10.) al13n

Congratulations guys!!

And here are the stats for the contest:

This contest was second largest in terms of participation for CodeChef Cook-Offs. Don’t get us wrong, we are not really looking to get good stats every time we host a contest but we just want you to enjoy our problems and improve your programming and algorithmic skills.

The short contest rankings again looks strong for Gennady with a lead of 1558.61 points. lyrically moves up from 36th to 10th place in Short Contest Rankings thanks to ELO!! dzhulgakov moves up to 3rd position and overtakes laycurse.

Now with the April Cook-Off done and dusted, we move towards our next long contest ‘The CodeChef May 2012 Challenge’ which will be live in another weeks time. Hope you guys have marked your calendar for the 1st of May, 2012.

Time to bid adieu. We have a long day ahead tomorrow.

Sayonnara,

Tojo,
Team CodeChef.

Whoa!! What a contest !! It’s ACRush who rushed in furiously in the dying hours of the APRIL12 contest and won it with an incredible jump in his ratings. Being a “something for all”, the contest kept the participants glued to the keyboard and monitors till the very end. And we hope everyone out there had a great time during the contest.

ACRush grabbed the first position on the rank-list by getting over tomek and that too with a good difference of rating points. He surpassed skorknure and Gennady in the concluding moments of the contest. Kudos to him as he actually started this contest just 2 days before the end! skorknure and Gennady stack up behind him for 2nd and 3rd positions. Congratulations guys.

A fact worth noting is, the top 3 are the only contestants who solved all the 10 problems, with the perfect score belonging to ACRush. The best of the Indians on the leader board is shadow with a score of 7.96. Congratulations shadow.

The problems for this contest were carefully handcrafted and baked by our chefs Sergey Kulik, Kaushik Iska, Tomaž Hočevar, Shangjingbo, AnhDQ, Vitaly Herasymiv, Ishani Parekh, Vamsi Kavala and the ever reliable and a now veteran David Stolp. We welcome our new problem setters on board with this contest. Say a ‘Hi’ to Kaushik Iska and Ishani Parekh. Ishani also becomes the first female in problem setting panel on CodeChef. Hiroto Sekido cleared the niggles before the problems went public. Without him the problems could have been half-cooked. A big round of applause for them please.

Now let’s quickly glance on the slightly overwhelming statistics of this contest.

This has the best Long contest so far in the history of CodeChef in terms of participation and submissions and we hope that we only grow from here.

And now the time to announce the top placed participants.

Global:

1.) ACRush
2.) skorknure
3.) gennady.korotkevich
4.) acube
5.) zhangjiejun
6.) pperm
7.) niyaznigmatul
8.) a9108cc
9.) Oleg
10.) fmm

Indian Winners:

1.) shadow
2.) smithinsu
3.) bloops
4.) ankit_shukla
5.) gurpreet_09
6.) ashish_massand
7.) the123abhishek
8.) logic_max
9.) javadecoder
10.) djdolls
11.) calc_saransh
12.) thesoulhacker
13.) Johar
14.) akash4983
15.) bluedestroyer
16.) sharatiitr
17.) sharpie
18.) mukulgupta
19.) svm11
20.) migdal

Congratulations to each and everyone.

We had some issue with our judge system due to which some of you may had the inconvenience of getting “internal server error” quite a few times. We are happy to announce that this has been fixed now. If anybody encounters this issue from hereon please let us know.

We also made some changes to the test data of problem PLAYFIT after the contest ended. This was necessary as an additional test data was pointed out by one of our participants. We added that test data and re-judged all submissions for this problem. For those who have now got a WA for the additional test data, we apologize for the changes after the contest ended. We could not do much in this matter.

As you guys may have noticed, we introduced Flags and newly improved ratings graphs as well as the rankings page. Hope you guys like the changes. Let us know what you guys think about the changes.

As usual the time has come to end this post. We have updated our contest ranks. See, where you stand after this contest here. The editorials for the contest can be found here. We will be hosting April Cook-Off(COOK21) on the 22nd of April. We hope the problems of the Cook-Off will be as enjoyable as this contest.

See you then.

-Tojo,
Team CodeChef.

Gennady Korotkevich worked out a perfect lightning quick strategy to win the CodeChef March Cook-Off. He took a lead at the very start and remained unbeatable till the very end. I bet this would have been a sweeter victory for him had he solved CIELWEB too. Incidentally, CIELWEB remains the unsolvable problem in the contest.

KADR and mikhailOK stacked up behind Gennady to take up the 2nd and 3rd place respectively. Congratulations guys!!

This Cook-Off was the second contest being dished out by Hiroto Sekido. And not without the work of Rajiv Aggrawal who checked out each and every ingredient and guided Hiroto in coming out with a good problem set. Thanks a lot Hiroto and Rajiv. You did a great job.

The contest started with an anticipation of a good fight between Gennady and EgorK. This we saw has been brewing up since the last contest in which EgorK notched up the first place and reduced the lead that Gennady had enjoyed so far. We were expecting him to make an entry till the very end. We missed you EgorK.

The disappointment was short lived though, as we witnessed a fierce battle for the 2nd and 3rd position between al13n, KADR and mikhailOK – all interchanging positions multiple times during the contest.

CIELNUM1 and CIELNUM2 appeared to be the easiest of the lot and we saw around 100 submissions for both the problems in the first half an hour of the contest. There was some trouble in understanding the statement for these problems initially, but our problem setter and tester tried their best to remove all the doubts. An area for us to improve.

The next hour saw participants trying intensely to get a successful submission for CIELLAND and CIELGAME. In the end, only the top 4 contestants could solve 4 problems from the entire set of 5. This problem set seemed to be a bit on the harder side. The editorials have been put up immediately to help you guys checkout all your doubts about the problems. Also feel free to ask your questions directly to our problem setter there.

Here are the official winners for the contest:
1.) gennady.korotkevich
2.) KADR
3.) mikhailOK
4.) al13n
5.) homo_sapiens
6.) uwi
7.) pperm
8.) niyaznigmatul
9.) mmaxio
10.) num314

rudradevbasak was the the top scorer for India at 19th position. He remains 22nd on the short contest rankings list.

And finally here are the stats:

The short contest rankings has now been heavily tilted to Gennady’s advantage as he has increased his rating points tally to 4723 from 4027. He enjoys a healthy lead of 800 points over EgorK who remains at 3891 points after his no show. Another mover in the top-10 rankings is al13n who moves to 7th place from his previous 8th. mmaxio also breaks into the top-10 after his consistently improving performance in the last few contests.

We now prepare for the April Long Contest which is being set by a good team of problem setters. We also have a few new faces among them. Hopefully you will like their problems. We will be back again with our next contest on the 1st of April. Do not forget to participate in this one. There are the new long contest rating points at stake

We also hope that you have been using our new forums to get your queries answered. We already have some interesting questions lined up there. Do not forget to check the questions out and answer the ones that you can . Please help out the community and gain karma. We need your support to build a self moderating community to help out each other. And do not forget to send us your feedback – good or bad, we love it.

That is all from me for now. Happy Coding!!!

-Tojo,
Team CodeChef.

Bonjour,

How quickly does time fly by? Seems only yesterday that the 3rd Anniversary edition of our Long Contest started and every one here was in a celebration mood (as depicted in these pics). Unfortunately, time has brought us again to the end of another appetizing March Long Contest. As most of us know this was a special contest which saw us foray in the 4th year of our successful en-devour.

We cannot give any prizes for guessing the winner, as we have tie!! Yes, and its a coincidence that we have a 3-way tie for our 3rd anniversary contest . The 1st place is shared by ACRush, hirosegolf and snapdragon with perfect 10 points. They were the only participants who could finish up our entire meal of 10 problems. lepetrandr is some distance away at 4th. Well done guys. Your guys deserve the top spot.

The Indian rank list is devoid of any tie and we have a clear winner in rudradevbasak. kiranjot and shadow follow him in 2nd and 3rd place respectively. Congratulations to all of them.

Here are the top ten Global/top twenty Indian winners and their positions:

Global:

1.) ACRush
1.) hirosegolf
1.) snapdragon
4.) lepetrandr
5.) acube
6.) ushsh
7.) skorknure
8.) tanzaku
9.) emkjp
10.) enot

Indian:

1.) rudradevbasak
2.) kiranjot
3.) shadow
4.) dudechandan123
5.) Idiotsid
6.) gultus
7.) ashish_massand
8.) shettynamit
9.) sunny816.iitr
10.) rizwanhudda
10.) sharatiitr
10.) smithinsu
13.) digo
14.) chetan_ug2k10
14.) diamondfist
14.) mischievous_me
14.) shubhanshu
14.) suh_ash2008
14.) viv001
20.) ashish.pant
20.) mcsharma1990
20.) pradeep_chf
20.) rishabhm

Congratulations to each and everyone.

The contest was a success, with slightly lower participation than the previous February Long Contest in terms of numbers. But we are not loosing our sleep over it, as long as you guys enjoyed and relished the problem set laid out for you.Do let us know what you think. I believe the this will be made up in the next contest.

The people without whom the problem set would not be possible: Hiroto Sekido, Duc, Shilp Gupta, Nikhil Garg, Sergey Kulik, Vamsi Kavala, Vitaliy Herasymiv. Let us reserve some applaud for them. Not to forget our ever-diligent problem tester Anton Lunyov. This guy has been extremely professional in his testing duties. He has been consistently testing out our Long Contest problem-set in spite of his internship duties in one of the top web company. A big applause for him. Our setters have also prepared the editorials for those who found the going tough in the contest. You can read them here.

A short mention for the Challenge problem TOMJERRY, which took some time to be ‘contest-ready’. The problem was originally authored by Duc who had to leave it halfway due to his professional commitments. The problem was taken up by Shilp Gupta, who, I bet, had to spent some sleepless nights to come up with solid proof test cases for the problem. And the nights were prolonged by some continuous invalidation of those cases by the wily Anton! And the time zone difference between them certainly did not help either’s sleep. Thanks a lot Shilp and Anton. You are amazing!

Now for the contest statistics:

We have been quite satisfied with way Short Contest Ratings are turning up and it breathes some stiff competition in the contest as well. There was no doubt amongst us, here at CodeChef, that our Long Contest Ratings should also be based on the ELO Rating. And, so as we had promised we have enabled ELO ratings for our Long Contest ratings calculation and it is live now. You can check your new Long Contest Rating here. What this implies is that you will be able to hold on to the your spot only if you are consistent.

So what are you guys waiting for? Sharpen up your skills for our next Long Contest coming up on 1st of April.

For those who wish to see the old archived Long Contest ratings, you can view them here.

For our new users you can read more about the implementation of our rating system here.

We have also launched a newly revamped forums section a là stackoverflow style. We already have a few questions on the forums and more waiting to be asked. We are also planning to put up frequently emailed questions up on the forums. So keep watching that space.

That’s all from our side. Do keep pouring in your feedback at feedback@codechef.com. Next, we have our March Short Contest(COOK20) coming up. The problems are undergoing stringent testing as I write this post. The banner for the short contest will be posted soon. Do let us know if you like it. We have EgorK trailing Gennady by a narrow margin in the Short Contest ratings. Will he dis-mantle Gennady from the top spot? Don’t miss the action

-Regards,
Tojo

Let me first apologize for the delay in this post and some unexpected issues that we faced after the end of the contest that might have prevented you from checking your updated ratings and the editorials. The issue also made the site unusable for a while. We have identified the issue and corrected it.

The Valentine month February Cook-Off has come to an end. Our 5 dishes were feasted upon in style and I bet our coders today were very hungry, as all the five problems were devoured within the very first hour of the contest!

Thanks to Gennady Korotkevitch and Aleksey Tolstikov for accepting the role of Sous-Chefs. They painstakingly worked out in the kitchen for over a fortnight, to prepare this delightful feast for you. Lets give them a big round of applause.

Now let us take a look at the winners before we dwell in the happenings of the contest.

We had 3 contestants solving all 5 problems and we had to break the tie considering the time of submissions. The winner clearly is EgorK who solved all the 5 problems within the best time of 06:15:56. mikhailOK (whose showed up on the ranking chart about an hour into the contest) follows him followed by raveman (interestingly with 10 penalties!). Congratulations coders! Well done. The best of the lot from the Indian sub-continent, balakrishnan_v stands at 21.

Digging into the details, the contest started without any hiccups that CodeChef has seen off late. We saw the first submission of the contest from laycurse for the problem DAILY. More submissions followed for DAILY which, eventually ended with a tally of 445 AC submissions! The veterans started attacking other problems in the set as soon as they finished with DAILY. It didn’t take them long and were successful in solving with BEARS, CAREFUL and EQUATIO in succession. Thirty-five minutes had passed into the contest and problem AUTHEN was the only one left to get an AC submission. Eventually niyaznigmatul was the first to get an AC in AUTHEN. By the time EgorK had solved four problems and took the top spot in the rankings, pretty much everything was settled. There was no doubt in our problem setting panel mind that he was going to win this one.

Here are the top 10 winners of the contest. Congratulations to each and everyone of them :

1.) EgorK
2.) mikhailOK
3.) raveman
4.) uwi
5.) fhlasek
6.) maksay
7.) acube
8.) artem_rakhov
9.) kenny_horror
10.) laycurse

And finally here are the stats:

With this victory, and a short contest rating of 3891.50 EgorK cements his second position in the short contest rankings! He has still some way to go before he can dis-mantle Gennady You can take a look at the short contest rankings in here.

Before wrapping up this post let me remind you that we have our regular long contest coming as usual on the 1st of March. Make sure you don’t miss out this contest as we have something more in store. Keep watching the space for our announcements.

Before I take a bow, do not forget to have a look at the editorials and ask all your doubts directly to our problem setters. And keep sending your feedback/suggestions to feedback@codechef.com.

Regards,
Tojo,
Team CodeChef.

We hope you have enjoyed our feast of ’10 problems in 10 days’. The Febraury Long Contest is done and dusted. It has been a buzzing contest from day one. The numbers alone speak for themselves. Around 4000 submissions on day one, whereas total submissions for January Long Contest was only 8981!!

Individual problems also broke the record for the highest submissions recorded till date on CodeChef. LUCKY5 and MAXCOUNT saw 1108 and 1634 submissions respectively.

Now let’s roll the drums for the winners. cgy4ever stands tall on the top spot of the winners step. He is closely followed by a new entrant to CodeChef, a9108cc and our Indian fellow programmer, rudradevbasak. Congratulations Guys!! A big clap for them.

We were well supported by our panel of experienced problem setters and tester in bringing out this change at the very last minute. It would have not been possible without their efforts. A special thanks to Anton Lunyov for his diligent testing duties within a short span of time. Not to forget our problem setters David Stolp, Nikhil Garg, Hiroto Sekido, Sergey Kulik, Tasnim Imran Sunny, Tomaž Hočevar and Vitaliy Herasymiv who were equally brilliant and also enthusiastic in replying to your queries and moderating the contest.

The winners for the contest are:

Global Winners:
1.) cgy4ever
2.) a9108cc
3.) Fdg
4.) rizar_xd
5.) lyrically
6.) alexey_enkov
7.) riad
8.) tanzaku
9.) Oleg
10.) v__b

Indian Winners:
1.) rudradevbasak
2.) pragrame
3.) balakrishnan_v
4.) ashish.pant
5.) razimantv
6.) rizwanhudda
7.) logic_max
8.) anshulgoyal
9.) shadow
10.) sharatiitr
11.) akshay_utkarsh
12.) mprateek
13.) abhash
14.) dudechandan123
15.) calc_saransh
16.) drakknight
17.) javadecoder
18.) sankalp91
19.) shettynamit
20.) unusual

Congratulations to each and every one of them!!

Now is the time we all have been waiting for, to see the stats for the contest .

The change in the long contest format has surely been welcomed by many of you. We have seen an unusual surge in the new programmers participating in the contest. So, as we have already bragged so much, are we, at CodeChef, satisfied?… To some extent, yes. This has been an exceptional contest for CodeChef in its not so long history of 3 years Yes, 3 years it has been since CodeChef was conceived, and if our feeling is anything to go by, you guys have started enjoying it. And that makes us happy.

Though we would like to bask in the glory of this hugely successful contest, we realize that there is a lot yet to be achieved. There is still a lot of scope for improvement and there are still so many programmers whom we have to reach out to. While most of you seem to have liked this change, we would also like to get the feedback of those, who may not have found the change to be so good. Your feedback is very valuable to us and without it, we lose direction.

So, before I bid you adieu, I request you once more, to share with us your feedback about the new long contest format on feedback@codechef.com. Be it anything, the good or the bad! We really love to hear you speak.

And not to forget, the next month’s contest is going to be our 3rd year Special Anniversary Contest <happy tears>.  Book your calendar right now for the 1st of March, 2012. We have another surprise waiting in store for you. Keep watching this space for that!

And while we take some time out tonight to celebrate this contest and then gear up to take the remaining tasks head on, we urge you to not miss out the next short contest on the 18th of this month. It is prepared by none other than the man, err, the boy leading the ranking table, Gennady Korotkevich!

Ciao,

Tojo
Team CodeChef.