The return of calm and peace in the Cook-Off

3 min read

After the debacle that was August Mega Cook-Off 2015, the September Mega Cook-Off 2015 presented our engineering team with a chance to redeem themselves. It also put us all under tremendous pressure as it was the second of the three Mega Cook-Offs we were having this year and if anything goes south, we will only have one Cook-Off for selecting the 150 Indian ACM ICPC aspirants for their travel and registration reimbursements. Both of the aforesaid parameters hinted towards a high octane contest, for both, the organizers as well as the participants. Thankfully, it all went rather well for both. And how did it all happen? We will tell all in here. So let’s start.

The sever glitches that hampered the August Cook-Off 2015 highlighted that fact that changes are needed in the contest environment and our engineering team was onto them fixes straight away. Among the many changes that they made, the most prominent one was the lighter contest environment. Right before the September Cook-Off we launched a much lighter version of the contest environment to ensure smoother starts for our contests and we saw the results immediately. The smooth start to the COOK62 was a huge sigh of relief for everyone here at office and few others praying and wishing for a smoother contest in different parts of the world. It’s an incredible feeling to see your fixes withstanding the expectations and we were overjoyed with it. And now that we have had a smoother start to our contest, we wanted to make sure that remain this way till the very end, and it remained so. Yippy!

While all that was the tale of the pre-contest preps and fixes, let’s see what happened during the contest. Normally in our Cook-Offs, the battle among the Indian programmers is to finish in top 20, while their global counterparts fight for a place in top 10. There also are few slots available in the special achievers category. However, when it comes to the Mega Cook-Offs, the battle among the Indian programmers becomes bigger and fiercer as they now compete for a slot in the top 75. With the increase of slots to fight for, the number of participants fighting also increases significantly. And it’s that battle that earns these Mega Cook-Offs a special mention and a special recognition among the programming fraternity. The battles for this year are over and we hope all the top 75 candidates have received the intimation regarding their winnings and have responded to them accordingly.

While the battle on the Indian rank table was to secure the travel and registration reimbursements for the ACM ICPC India regionals, it was the good old fashioned rivalry at the ROW rank tables. The fight to the top started right from the start of the contest with ACRush making the first move with an AC on SPRNMBRS. It was only the 6th minute of the contest and we had seen submissions from the likes of xellos0, uwi, balajiganapath, lebron and many prominent names alongside ACRush. So, it is safe to say that the battle had started right from the first minute of the contest. It continued with dreamoon4 and notimesea joining in the party. With it, the three way battle to the top between ACRush, notimesea, and deamoon4 was on. And all of them very careful about every submissions they made into the contest and hence took their time to before making one. With 100% accuracy they were the frontrunners for the top slots and that’s where they ended. However, to find out who ended where, let us stroll through the rank tables.

First, the ROW top 10:

Now, the Indian top 5:

Congratulations to everyone on their brilliant performance in the September Cook-Off 2015.

If you faced any trouble during the contest or had trouble understanding the concept behind any problem from the contest, you can refer to the editorials for the problems below. And with ACM ICPC regionals fast approaching, we strongly recommend you going through them.

Now, before we put pen down on this post, let us thank the people responsible for the contest. For COOK62 we had Kanstantsin Sokal making a return to the kitchen. He was accompanied by Jingbo Shang, as the tester and Lalit Kundu, contributing as the editorialist. The Russian, Mandarin, and Vietnamese translations for the problem set came from Vasia Antonuik, Gedi Zheng, and Team VNOI respectively. And their final company was Rahul Arora. Thank you gentlemen for yet another fulfilling problem set. We hope to see many more such contests in near future.

With that, it’s time to put pen down on September Mega Cook-Off 2015 and move towards the final contest for the month, the September LunchTime 2015. We will soon be serving the story for September LunchTime, so keep watching this space. And while you wait, do let us know your thoughts on the post and the contest in the comments below or you can send them to us at: [email protected]

That will be all from us for now.

See you all at the contests.

Regards,
Rudreshwar
Team CodeChef

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