Hello Everyone,

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.

Hey All,

We will be undertaking some maintenance activity for our CodeChef server. During this period codechef.com and blog.codechef.com will remain unavailable.

Please note that time window for this maintenance is from 22nd Feb 06:00am(IST) to 06:30am(IST). You can check this time slot in your timezone here.

Update: We are postponing this maintenance plan. We will update you about the new maintenance plan soon. The site will be up and running till then.

Update: We have planned to carry out the maintenance activity on 24th Firday, 2012 at 00:30(IST). You can check this time in your timezone here.

-Regards,
Team CodeChef.

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.