May Challenge 2015 – For some it was pre-admission jitters, for others it was fun

Like we do after our every contest, when we sat down to pen the blog post for the May Challenge 2015, plethora of things, that must be mentioned in the blog post started floating in our heads. That and the significant delay made it even harder to get things straight. But we shall try, and relive all those wonderful moments once again, without missing any. However, being human makes us all a tad vulnerable to committing mistakes, kindly excuse us if we miss anything and in fact, let us know of it and we shall add that to the blog, post script.

So, let’s get started. Our May Challenge 2015 was shifted by a week from the scheduled start on first Friday of the month to facilitate the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi’s 2-credit course on competitive programming. We were pretty excited to be a part of this one of its kind initiative, and we are sure all the students who took part in the contest felt the same. We hope to see many other institutions follow the path and recognize the significance of competitive programming for their students.

The start of May Challenge 2015 was festooned with the presence of the M. Tech aspirants from IIITD and many other programming fanatics from all over the globe. The delay of one week apparently did not deter the programming lovers. And our problem setting panel featuring Praveen Dhinwa, Vitalij Kozhukhivskij, Vasia Antoniuk, Amit Pandey, Abhra Dasgupta, Sunny Aggarwal, Sergey Kulik, and Yuyang Huang made sure that it remained that way all through the ten days of the contest. And we got it’s affirmation inside the first five minutes of the contest with the submission from gennady.korotkevich. But he was not the only big name popping on the rank table so early in the contest; we had the likes of ACRush, kutengine, mugurelionut and many more making an appearance early in the contest. So, it was safe to presume that the May Challenge 2015 has a decent start.

Now, while the initial days of May Challenge 2015 were predominantly about the heavy weights, we saw some new names surfacing atop the rank tables as well. The presence of kut_ksr, sadhwaniyash6, usaxena95, ginger88895 and few others ensured the folks topping the charts at the start do not get much of rest time on the top. And our tester Kevin Charles Atienza ensured that both, the pros and the novices get to enjoy the problems alike. We hope you all did. Now, without further adieu let’s go and meet all our winners shining bright on the May Challenge 2015 rank table.

We start with the top ten performers from rest of the world:

• kutengine
• mugurelionut
• kut_ksr
• ACRush
• zhouyuchen
• aawisong
• zimpha
• avolchek
• notimesea
• argos

And now, our Indian top 20:

• win_ay
• amitsaharana
• sadhwaniyash6
• usaxena95
• stud_ious
• anuj95
• akulsareen
• akash4983
• gvaibhav21
• deathsurgeon
• vvneagleone
• vijayarsenal10
• ashish1610
• ashu1461
• wodahs_cc
• itisalways42
• sagarkaniche
• tapan0007
• manu4rhyme
• logic_max

Now, it’s time to meet our special achievers. We start with participants with highest scores for the challenge problem, apart from the winners:

First, the top 3 from rest of the world:

• lboris
• shizhouxing
• bcurcio

Now, the Indian top 3:

• rishabhtwr07
• lucifer2709
• hobbit2000

Finally, it’s our little geniuses from schools.

We start with the top five school kids from rest of the world:

• ginger88895
• mappinator
• mazeyu
• zhouzixin
• function348

And now, the top 5 Indian school kids:

• sampritipanda
• animesh_f
• rajat1603
• supersri_pro
• c_utkarsh

Big round of applause for the winners and for everyone who made May Challenge a successful contest.

Now, after the rank tables, let’s present the final stats of the May Challenge when the clock stopped on the contest.

• Total Users: 6003
• Total Submissions: 107966
• Number of distinct users with correct submissions: 5021
• Total users from India: 5027
• Total users not from India: 976

With over 6K users making over 1 lakh submissions, we think it’s safe to say that you all enjoyed the hard work put in by our problem setting panel. The Russian and Mandarin variants of the problems came from Sergey Kulik and Gedi Zheng respectively and added some more flavor in to the contest.

That brings us to the end of this prolonged delayed blog post for May Challenge 2015, we hope you enjoyed the contest thoroughly. We will come back with more stories from our contests, but till then, enjoy the rains and keep sending your suggestions, feedback to us at: [email protected]

Till next time.

Regards,

Rudreshwar

Team CodeChef