With January Challenge 2015, we not only started a New Year, but also barged into a new era. It is an era where procrastinating typing a code or abstaining from coding due to the dearth of a compiler are all things of past. You, now have more security for your code and less excuses to stay away from coding. The era of CodeChef’s “Code, Compile, & Run” environment has started, so put all your excuses of not coding to rest and just press “Ctrl” + “;”, type IDE and get started.
Marking the beginning of this new era with us was one of the largest participation in any of long challenges. On the backdrop of all that, we think we all had a pretty great start to our New Year. And what followed that epic start complemented it equally well, making January Challenge 2015 one of the biggest long challenges we’ve had here on CodeChef.
Before we go any further let us thank the real architects of this bravura first contest of the year 2015. The problem setting bench was graced by Dmytro Berezin, Fedor Korobeinikov, Gaoyuan Chen, Lalit Kundu, Praveen Dhinwa, Sergey Nagin, Snigdha Chandan, and Sunny Agarwal, while the responsibility of testing all those problems went to Shiplu Hawlader. The editorialist penning down the editorials for all those problems was Lalit Kundu, while the Russian and Mandarin flavors of the problem statement came from Sergey Kulik and Gedi Zheng. If numbers are anything to go by, we are pretty sure that you all enjoyed the work of the aforementioned gentlemen to the very last moment. If you think we are wrong, do send us your opinions, we’d love to hear your side of the tale.
With a new playground to play, enticing problem set, and plethora of cool features to play with, it was finally the turn of the participants to come and make their presence felt at the first CodeChef party of the year. And boy, did they come. The contest opened to the flurry of accepted submissions on GCDQ, SEAND2, and CHEFSTON, with the latter one getting the majority of them. The flow of submissions steadied as we reached the half way stage of the contests, but with the end still far from sight, no one was ready to go easy on that paddle. But the path from here onwards was not all that undemanding.
By now, the easy problems like CHEFSTON, have had seen their fair share of submissions and now the focus of the table leaders shifted onto the likes of XRQRS, RANKA, SEALCM, and QSET. Each of them made life tough atop the rank table. But after spending most of the time on top of the rank table, the likes of mugurelionut, protocolocon, argos and some more knew exactly how to crack those few problems standing between them and the glory in the first long challenge of year 2015. And while they were busy finding their way to the top, in came the terrific trio of msm1993, kutengine, and rns4 and before anyone could understand what happened, they had their names cemented atop the rank table. Though they entered pretty late into the contest, but they hardly took anytime in reaching on the top of the table. And like a thrilling end to an exciting superhero movie, the January Challenge 2014 concluded with a mix of familiar and new names shining atop the rank table.
Now, let us meet the winners of the first Long Challenge of the year 2015.
As always we start with the non-Indian top 10:
The Indian top 20:
- akash4983
- triveni
- ashu1461
- varun_syal
- pulkit
- rednivrug15
- nikdon1993
- andbluer
- djdolls
- kevind
- anshuman1294
- pranet
- conspirator21
- bustyasians
- wrong_turn
- dddlll
- krishkoushik
- vishalkarve15
- code_note
- sarasgupta
Let’s now meet the special achievers, in participants with highest scores for the challenge problem SEAND2.
The non-Indian top three:
The Indian top three:
And now it’s school time. Let’s meet our top five global as well as Indian school students from the January Challenge 2015:
We start with the non-Indian top 5:
- a00012025 of Kaohsiung Municipal Kaohsiung Senior High School
- hzwer of Fuzhou No.1 High School
- tonynater of Aragon High School San Mateo, California
- xllend3 of Zhenhai High School, China
- zcc598066456 of Zhenhai High School, China
And now, the Indian top 5:
- tanay1998 of Delhi Public School R.K. Puram
- rajat1603 of Delhi Public School, Dwarka
- neo1tech9_7 of Bharti Public School, New Delhi
- sampritipanda of Sai International School
- animesh_f of La Martiniere for Boys, Calcutta
Give a big round of applause to all the winners of years’ first long challenge and to everyone for making it such a big one.
Now, to tell you exactly how big the contest was, here are the final stats of the contest.
- Total Users: 8576
- Total Submissions: 177187
- Number of distinct users with correct submissions: 7943
- Total users from India: 7431
- Total users not from India: 1145
With those numbers to kick start our year, we are sure it will be a good one. And with you all by our side, we certainly can make it a memorable one.
Now, before we part ways and move towards the January Cook-Off 2015, let us take you to the editorials for the contest, which we are sure you would have tasted by now. However, if you haven’t already you can go it now.
And with that, we will enfold this January Challenge 2015. We hope you had a great start to the year with the contest as we had. If you have any concerns or queries, regarding the contest feel free to drop them at: [email protected]
You can also give us a call at: (022) – 30797709
That will be all for now. Till next time, adios.
See you all at the contests.
Regards,
Rudreshwar
Team CodeChef
