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

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.

Since last 2 hours some of you might have faced Internal Server Error on our forum. We regret for the same and feel happy to announce that we have come up with faster forums. Now you will experience a better performance while browsing our forum

The error you faced was due to our ongoing changes on the website. Now we have successfully done the changes and you’ll no more be getting such errors. If in case any such error occurs please mail the same at feedback@codechef.com.

Abhijeet,
Team Codechef

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.

Moving with time, CodeChef has brought you many changes. This year, with us entering into our 4th year of existence, we introduced a Brand New Forum, where people can interact and share their ideas about any queries related to contests, algorithms and anything related to programming.

We also brought you the new ELO based long contest ratings and improved our long contests by increasing the number of problems and hence providing a something for all – be it a newbie or an expert.

The changes do not stop here. We are committed to giving you a good experience along with your learning. Continuing the trend, we would like to present you some UI (User Interface) changes, which, we believe will enhance your experience on the website.

Here we go with our changes -

THE FLAGS

The time has come to be on the Top. Lead globally or in your own country and bring your country flag up. Yes you got it right , now you would be able to see your country flag on the rank lists for short and long contests. Moreover you would be able to view it on your very own profile page.

THE HIGH RISE

You all must have seen the stock market going high and low. Doesn’t it build up the excitement in the buyer/seller ? So now it is your time to experience the same (and even more) level of excitement. You can see your ratings in the same way. Keep your fingers crossed at the end of each contest to see how much you have gained (lost ). Get to know about others too – how your friends fared in the last contest.

Isn’t it cool? Wait !! We still have one more cat in the bag.

Aren’t you bored of seeing your static rating graph on your profile page?  No!!! :-O That’s really nice of you But we do!

Now you can use your CodeChef handle as your IDENTITY. See your progress report in a graphical way, not only for the long contests, but also for the short one.

And no my dear friends, this time it’s not just “see”! In fact it is “play”, “download”, “print” & “use”. These graphs are not just images. You can play around with them and zoom in for a better view. Download your rating graph in 4 different formats. Print your graph and use it wherever you want to. Put them on your Facebook walls. Share them among your friends.

I hope you all will like to use these changes as much as we have loved bringing them to you. There is still a lot more to come. Stay tuned and enjoy “coding”!

And please please please do not forget to let us know how much you love us. .

With all well wishes “ta-ta”.

Abhijeet,
Team CodeChef.

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.

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

We know we took a while to do this.  It started as an internship project of one of our fellow CodeCheffers, Balajiganapathi in the month of June 2011!  But then we got caught up between various other things and somehow this lost steam. We are grateful to Balaji for taking this up and today we are happy to be able to make “his project” see the light of the day. We are very hopeful that our now dormant community will benefit from this and will become more vibrant. Please read the FAQ for more details about the new forums.

Yes, the new forum site is now live. Once the DNS propagation happens you will be able to visit it at the same old URL. Till then you may face a redirection. The old forums will remain for a while at the new URL.

So what are you waiting for? Let us make asking Questions and giving Answers a fun process and in the process help each other around. For any queries or assistance related to new forums send in an email to help@codechef.com.

And please keep sending us your feedback, both good and bad.

Cheers,
Tojo Chacko
(Team CodeChef)

However, the path till here has not been without any hiccups. We have faced many challenges in between – both small and big, some good and some bad, some that we knew how to handle and some that we learned only when they hit us. We have certainly not been perfect. All this made us believe that we have seen it all. But we know that there is a lot more to come and we are not taking it easy. If anything, we only feel confident. The appreciation emails and comments that we receive provide us an impetus to give that extra bit.

And the journey has been a thorough learning experience for each one of us too. Not that we saw ourselves here when we started. And we are happy that we are here today. This wouldn’t have been possible without the contributions of various people who have helped us in our endeavor:

• The brilliant problem setters and testers who have created and validated the amazing collection of problems that we can boast of today,
• The SPOJ team which has been tirelessly working in the background to give us a very powerful judge program,
• The community out there that is helping other programmers to resolve their doubts,
• The various support teams and people here at Directi, who enable the functioning of the CodeChef team,
• The ex-members of our very own team,
• And finally and most importantly you all for your participation and absolutely amazing feedback and critique.

We feel deeply grateful and humbled to have all your support today.

Let me take this opportunity to try and summarize where we stand after these 3 years:

• What started as a unique 10 day long contest hosting platform, we quickly added to it the shorter format and will be hosting the 20th successful short contest this month.
• The user base has grown close to 1,00,000 globally.
• We have a whopping number of 1793 unique problems in our practice section and it is growing by at least 24 problems per month.
• We have hosted close to 200 college contests other than the regular contests conducted by us.
• Our problem setting/testing panel has grown to a size of 50 including many of the top programmers from across the globe.
• We have had 8,77,447 submissions to problems made by 33151 different users/teams and this will be stale data by the time you are reading this.
• We received more than 600 emails from the community and responded to each one of them in the last year alone.
• We have Campus chapters in almost all the prominent and many more colleges from across the country.
• We have distributed goodies to more than 35 cities in India and 80 cities to other parts of the globe just in the last 4 months.
• We introduced the find a bug and get a goody policy and have given away 10 t-shirts to people who have helped us in finding bugs as a token of our appreciation.
• More than 15000 fans are on our Facebook page and we have close to 2500 followers on Twitter.

Today, we are on the doorsteps of addressing one of the many issues in our long list of “to be done’s”. We are about to launch a new Forum. We have received a whole lot of feedback from you guys to make the forums more interesting and active. We have been working on it all this while to present you a Question and Answer Style forum, which we believe is more suited to a community like CodeChef. Keep watching this space on more about it. They will be up soon.

We will also be changing the present long contest rating system to the more dynamic ELO based rating system by the end of the running contest. Hopefully it will make the game more exciting and competitive. Next in line will be the revamp of our tutorials/editorials sections. This is one area where we have received a lot of feedback to improve upon. We have been able to do only so much till now. Hopefully this will change soon.

Yesterday, we took time off from work and pampered ourselves in celebrating our third anniversary as a gesture of patting us on our back! Please check out the photos and spare a moment to wish us a Happy Birthday.

We have grown by leaps and bounds and we cannot thank you enough for this. We have started expanding our dream to provide to all the students across the globe the best fun learning platform in the field of programming! We still have a very long way to go and with all your support we know we will be there. Without you, without your feedback all this was unachievable. We feel happy, we feel humbled, we feel confident and we feel hopeful today!

Do keep sending your feedback. We love it. Thank you.

The CodeChef Team,
Suraj Sharma, Tojo Chacko, Abhijeet Pandey and Anup Kalbalia.

Codechef.com is up and working now. You can start making your submissions

All maintenance activities have been successfully completed. It took us longer than expected to bring the site up after maintenance. There were some un-expected technical glitches while bringing up our judge back online. We apologize for the delay.

-Regards,
Team CodeChef.