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,

What a way to end the year! All our previous records have been shattered!!!

Let me make this official – this has been our most highly participated Cook-Off till date Also let me break the tradition and first share with you the stats as I am still unable to gulp them.

As you can see, by pure numbers, we have the highest user participation and highest number of total submissions in the history of CodeChef Cook-Off’s (The previous high being 566 users in the fourteenth edition and 3231 submissions in the sixth edition) and by some margin!

Let me congratulate and thank Hiroto Sekido and Shangjingbo for giving us this brilliant contest. Please raise a toast for both Hiroto and Shangjingbo. <claps>

Now, the contest summary! The contest started with a whammy for us. We know this has been a consistent problem since the last few contest with the problem statements not being visible for an initial period. Though we feel embarrassed to apologize again, we can’t help but beg your pardon. We are working hard to solve this problem.

So much for the bad part. After the initial glitch, we got first submissions for CIELAB, which eventually saw 642 submissions. CIEL8STR also saw 216 submissions. These were the 2 problems that most of the participants attempted first. By the time theses they were submitted the leader board was settled and remained idle for some time.

mmaxio made the first kill by solving CIELQUIZ and raised the bar for others. His competitors didn’t sit idle and soon after the leader board kept on tumbling. EgorK ruled the charts till the end by solving 4 problems first.

We, admins, had put our bets on EgorK in the last 20 minutes to win, with the exception Hiroto, who wanted lyrically to take the honors (shhhh). No one was able to solve CIELWALK till the very end and our problem setting/testing panel started wondering whether this was too hard a problem for a Cook-Off. But thankfully, gojira proved them wrong.

Our very own Indian compatriot rudradevbasak broke into the top 10 in the last few minutes. This is the first appearance of an Indian in the Top 3 in Cook-Off’s. Way to go Rudradev. We wish you bring more glory to India in the ICPC world finals. And we also hope that other Indian participants follow suit.

In all, it was a brilliantly fought out contest and we thank all of you in making this Cook-Off a great success. We are further motivated to bring better problem sets for the next Cook-Off’s.

And the winners are…

1.) EgorK
2.) dzhulgakov
3.) rudradevbasak
4.) anton_lunyov
5.) Gassa
6.) petr
7.) lyrically
8.) raveman
9.) mmaxio
10.) al13n

The final Cook-Off rankings can we viewed here. Don’t forget to ask your questions directly to the problem setter here.

The short contest ratings have also been updated. gennady.korotkevich still rules the rank list even after a disappointing end to a glorious year. EgorK has closed in to both gennady and laycurse after his brilliant performance to end the year on a big high. What makes this performance special is that all the 4 higher rated players in this contest were participating and he still came on top. This performance has made him climb 2 places from 5th to 3rd! rudradevbasak is now ranked 22nd globally and 1st on the Indian rank list. Checkout where you stand before you start 2012 here.

That is all from us for now. We will be hosting our usual Long Contest at the start of the next month which incidentally also happens to be the beginning of a new calendar year.

Let me take this opportunity to wish each and everyone of you a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year on behalf of the entire CodeChef team.

Happy Holidays,
Tojo
Team CodeChef.

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.

Midnight greetings, CodeCheffers!

The November Cook-Off contest has concluded. It was a good fight for the top spot between petr and lyrically until the final hour or so when ogiekako suprisingly chipped in to the 2nd spot.

It was a well balanced problem set, thanks to Gennady Korotkevich and Anton Lunyov. A big round of applause for them plesae. Gennady, also incidentally made a problem setting debut on CodeChef today. yay!!

There was another debut which we are sure may not have gone un-noticed Yes, please welcome petr on CodeChef. He is currently ranked 2nd across most global programming sites.

The contest also had good number of participation from Japan and Russia which may be due to Gennady’s problem set. Indian participation was subdued which left us sad

Now, moving on to the winners of this contest:

01. petr
02. ogiekako
03. lyrically
04. KADR
05. dzhulgakov
06. raveman
07. al13n
08. laycurse
09. Ra16bit
10. jughead

The final Cook-Off rankings can be viewed here.

The statistics for the November Cook-Off are as follows:

As you can see, the participation numbers were not swelling, but the contest was well fought out. For the first time, we had the Indian participation being less than the Rest of the World!

The editorials for the problem set can be viewed here.

We hope you guys mark out your calendar for the next Cook-Off since its going to be the final Cook-Off for this year. We will be also be hosting as usual our regular long contest on December 1st. See you guys there. In between, keep your likes, mails and tweets coming to us. We love to respond to them.

Regards,
Tojo Chacko.

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.

Hi guys,

The ACM ICPC Kanpur Online Round that took place on CodeChef has now ended.

A total of 224 teams of 2 & 3 individuals each registered for the competition and here are the  key statistics for the event:

The final team rankings can be found here.

A more detailed ranking table is available here.

The final list of teams that will make it to the onsite round of the Kanpur competition will be declared In the latter half of the coming week following a more rigorous inspection.

Congratulations to you all!

The problems have now been transferred to the practice section so you can all try your hand at it now.

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.

Patrons of programming!

The October Long Contest for 2011 concluded this afternoon at 1500 hrs (IST). And what a good contest it was!

Unlike the September Challenge, there were no ties on the global as well as the Indian rank list. This is a testimony in the form of a standing ovation to the quality of the problems; for which we are profoundly grateful to the problem setters and tester.

The men responsible are Gennady Korotkevitch, Vamsi Kavala, Hiroto Sekido, Anirban Mitra, AnhDQ, Ankul Garg, and problem tester Harsha S. Thank you once again!

Now, for a special mention to our indigenous programmers: For the first time in the history of the CodeChef Long Contest, the global top-10 ranks included five Indian programmers. Seeing as all of us here at CodeChef share that nationality, we were understandably pleased. Well done guys, you make us proud.

Just a little more trivia before we move on to the lists of winners. The aggregate number of submissions this month was nearly double than that of last month’s. This may well be the result of a cleverly-crafted challenge problem, for which we have none other to thank than Mr. Korotkevitch.

The relevant statistics for this month are:

Contest Statistics:

Both average scores — for users from, and outside India — have increased. This may be due to the decrease in the overall difficulty of the contest’s problems. (That does not overrule the possibility that the average intelligence of the participants was higher. )

Anyway, without further ado, here are your twenty distinct winners for October:

India:

1.   rudradevbasak
2.   pragrame
3.   balakrishnan_v
4.   utkarsh_lath
5.   Johar
6.   architk
7.   rishabhm
8.   theicebreaker
9.   ron
10. gurpreet_09

Rest of the World:

1.    prgobet
2.   nevidomy
3.   anton_lunyov
4.   cgy4ever
5.   raveman
6.   lutyj
7.   fandes
8.   todo
9.   tanzaku
10. abkqz

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 23rd of October. The intensity begins at 2130 hrs, so be there!

Cheers,
Team CodeChef.

Midnight greetings, CodeCheffers!

The September Cook-off, in collaboration with Directi’s Go for Gold initiative, and the Amritapuri ACM ICPC regionals warm up contest has concluded, amidst subdued cheers in our office; this was the highest ever participation for a Cook-off, and we have no one to thank for that but all of you, the participants.

Of course, this would never have been possible without our problem setter, the evergreen David Stolp, and our debuting problem tester, Aleksey Tolstikov. Our most sincere gratitude to the both of you for making this possible.

We employed the cluster judging system for this Cook-off, and this ensured its smooth progress throughout the 150-minute duration. Our developers’ were smiling throughout.

Now, to move on to the winners of this special Cook-off:

01. laycurse
02. nevidomy
03. gawry
04. forest
05. ilyakor
06. phinfinity
07. fhlasek
08. Igor Kudryashov
09. Amtrix
10. acube

The final Cook-off rankings can be viewed here.

The statistics for the September Cook-off are as follows:

As you may have noticed, there was a great increase in the Indian number of participants, and this was undeniably because of Amritapuri University’s ACM ICPC regionals warm up contest collaborating with us.

A special mention to laycurse, whose stellar performance in the September and August Cook-offs has enabled him to close the gap between him and first-placed gennady to a hair’s breadth in the short contest rankings. Good to see someone gunning for that top spot!

David Stolp’s editorials can be viewed here.

We look forward to seeing all of you participating in the October 2011 Challenge that begins on 1st October, 2011.

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,

Adarsh Loyal.

Bon soir(!) my algorithm-toting friends.

As you may well know, the September Cook-off goes live this Sunday, 18th September 2011.

What you may NOT know, is that this is the last short contest we’re conducting before the online round of the Amritapuri ACM-ICPC regionals 2011, which takes place on the 16th of October.

Grab the opportunity to gear up for it with the September CookOff, our warm up to the Amritapuri regionals. You’re going to need all the practice you can get!

The Cook-off will commence at 2130 hrs, IST. As usual, submission-time ends with the day. Don’t forget to bring your A-game!

Wondering what the ACM ICPC  regionals are?

They are the qualifying round to the olympics of all programming competitions, the ACM ICPC World Finals, taking place in Warsaw, Poland this time! Find out more here.

Register for the Amritapuri regionals here.