ACRush eclipsed

Coming out of a relationship isn’t the most pleasing feeling. We had just ended our 3-year-old relationship with our ever dependable server and entered into a new one with the cloud. Just like all new relationships, we too were embracing every moment of this new commitment. And hoping that things go nicely. It wasn’t too long, before it was put through the first test during May Challenge 2013. And we did come out unscathed.

The May Challenge 2013 was an exciting contest for us for more than one reason. Yes, it was the first successful contest on our new infrastructure. And, it was the first time when ACRush didn’t win the long challenge that he has participated in. In fact, he was not even among the top three. It is not often that you see legends being defeated. Gentlemen from Romania, North Korea, and Belarus, namely mugurelionut, scli, and gennady.korotkevich eclipsed the dominant ACRush. It is always good to see competition, a healthy one. And this has already set a nice build-up for all our future long challenges. We all know that he will strike back. And that was not the only highlight in the rank charts. We had reason to celebrate in the two Indian participants, balajiganapath and pulkit being among the top ten global winners! A big round of applause for all the winners.

The May Challenge 2013 began with a platter of eight juicy problems. And the users were on to them right from the beginning. Going by the initial submission trend, we found that, contrary to the saying, there is indeed a lot in the “NAME,” as our NAME1 and NAME2 problems saw flurry of submissions. The first one to get over the NAME1 mystery was manish05, who cracked the problem in the sixth minute of the contest. While most of the users were busy cracking up NAMEs, some others were seen taking Field Trip. And enjoying it quite well. Among the early boarders on the field trip train, there were the biggies like ACRush, mugurelionut, and anton_lunyov. Apparently, mugurelionut enjoyed the trip the most. While, our users were enjoying the flavors, our problem setters were busy spicing up the remaining two problems for the contest.

The ninth and tenth problems were added on third and fourth day of the contest respectively. The tenth problem was the challenge problem and it proved to be a great one as well. Appreciation from all quarters came for pieguy’s Password Cracking Challenge and participants complemented his hard work with theirs. And everyone was going all out to make the most of it. At one point we had scli and mugurelionut having a score of almost a perfect ten, enjoying the first and second spot. mugurelionut continued from there and successfully defended his stay at the top till the very end in spite of some stiff competition. Now, let’s take you through the rank tables that incidentally features some of the biggest names ever on CodeChef!

Drum roll please!

The International Top Ten includes:

1.      mugurelionut
2.      scli
3.      gennady.korotkevich
4.     ACRush
5.     anton_lunyov
6.     Oleg
7.     llj_bash
8.    forifchen
9.    dkac
10.  sy2006

The Indian Top Twenty includes:

1.      balajiganapath
2.      pulkit
3.      djdolls
4.      anudeep2011
5.      viv001
6.      ishanbhatnagar
7.      sandipan
8.      deepankarak
9.      nims11
10.   prakashgayasen
11.   vineetonrole
12.   nishantrk
13.   akash4983
14.   ka4tik
15.   n2n_
16.   sandesh_deshu
17.   darkshadows
18.   manish05
19.   ritesh_gupta
20.   anunay_arunav

Now, with the very exciting and much appreciated Challenge problem, it is only fair that the participants with the highest score for this challenge problem (not in the above list) are also rewarded.

Global:

1. samjay
2. natsugiri
3. inseder

Indian:

1. averma14
2. avatarroku
3. strong_fast

Cheers to all the winners!!

The May Challenge 2013 also brought us the highest number of submissions in any long contest. So, along with the star studded rank charts, there were a few other reasons to be happy.

Let us take you through some of those reasons in terms of the stats for the contest.

• Total Users: 2958
• Total Submissions: 76896
• Number of distinct users with correct submissions: 2435
• Total users from India: 2323
• Total users not from India: 635

Boy, that’s a lot of submissions on only ten problems! All thanks to our meticulous problem setters, testers and editorials and not to forget, you. For May Challenge 2013, the problem setting panel featured Shanjingbo, Vinayak Garg, Manish Kumar, Shalini Sah, Vamsi Kavala, Kaushik Iska, Roman Rubanenko, David Stolp and Tuan Anh. This time the responsibility of testing was shared between David Stolp & Pradeep Mathias, who did a commendable job! And Shilp Gupta churned out the delicious editorials, go check them now here. If you did not notice, we had two debutants in our problem-setting panel in Manish Kumar and Shalini Sah. Join us to welcome them aboard. These wonderfully talented individuals can be accredited for the brilliant May Challenge 2013 we all enjoyed. So, a big thank to all of them.

Now, while we bask in the glory of one more successful contest and embark on the journey with our new infrastructure, we must not forget the hiccups. It wasn’t grave, but it forced us to extend the contest duration by 1 hour towards the end. It was caused because of the unexpectedly large number of submissions queued up for the challenge problem. Everyone wanted to better their previous scores and hence were making multiple submissions every minute. This made the judge’s task very hard and consequently affected its response time as  it tried its best to recompute the score of everyone on each submission. You would agree that the task is not envious. We had to restrict the allowed number of submissions to 1 in every 180 seconds for every user to bring down the queue. It wasn’t a very easy decision on our part, but had to be taken at the moment. We have now enforced this limit across the whole website with a reduced restriction of 1 submission in every 30 seconds. We felt this is the least we could do to help the judge server. After this small glitch, things went smoothly and the May Challenge 2013 came to end.

After the memorable May Challenge 2013, we are all set for the May Cook-Off 2013. So, don’t forget to join us on 19th May 2013 at 21:30 IST to taste the delicacies from problem setter Abdullah Al Mahmud, with tester Shilp Gupta and editorialist Pradeep Mathias.

Do share your feedback, suggestions or just drop in a mail to see how we are doing at [email protected]. We love hearing from you people.

Till next time, adios everybody.

See you at the contests.

Thanks,
Rudreshwar
Team CodeChef