Hello, there! A nerve-wracking, exciting challenge is what gets all going, right? Like F1 is to car racing, and WT20 is to cricket, we have the LockOut for Competitive Programming! Now let’s delve into some quick details about LockOut and have a quick sneak peek.
What is CodeChef LockOut?
LockOut is a Competitive Programming challenge where two top coders across the globe, sometimes on two different continents, face each other and engage in a challenging and exciting competition to bag the title of the LockOut Champion. The contest lasts for 60 minutes and involves excellent skill and precision, and in the end, the fastest finger wins.
As the name indicates, the most crucial rule in this game is that once a player solves a problem, the other can’t solve it and gains the points for that. So literally, ‘locking the other person’ from proceeding further with that particular question.
The CodeChef LockOut challenge consists of 6 questions, and every question is of varying difficulty level, thereby the scores that the player can gain for each question is different. The scores assigned for each question in the increasing order of difficulty are 101, 202, 304, 408 516, and 632 respectively. In the end, the player with the highest score, or all the total 1100 points is declared as the champion.
Sneak Peek into the previous Lockouts
We saw the first edition of LockOut go live about three months ago, in July. Our debutante coders for this edition were Kshitij Sodani, a fourteen-year-old IOI Silver Medalist, and Gaurav Sultane, an SDE at Google! Isn’t it already aspiring to see how a school kid can go against an experienced professional from one of the most famous tech companies in the world? After an hour of an intense coding face off Kshitij Sodani was declared the first LockOut champion. You can find the problems here!
In the LockOut V2.0, we saw JeevanJyot Singh, an ex-intern at Swiggy challenge Sai Avinash, yet another SDE at Google. While Sai Avinash got a quick start and started locking the problems, Jeevan Jyot was fast enough to pick up and catch up. But in the end Sai Avinash bagged the title for the day.
Nischay Manwani, our very own host for the previous LockOuts and an ex-intern at Rubrik, went against Udit Sanghi, an IOI Silver Medalist, in the third edition of LockOut.Not Too Colourful was the problem which kept both of them on their toes and fighting to grab the points. For LockOut 4.0, we saw Yash Daga, a 6-star coder in CodeChef, fight for the title with Anshu Garg, a 7-star coder in CodeChef, and Anshu Garg grabbed the title with a hefty 806 points!
Coding Battle from two sides of the world!
There have been five editions of LockOut to date, and the most interesting and nail-biting one yet was the most recent one. In LockOut V5.0, we saw two of the world’s most renowned and ICPC champions go against each other. Alex aka um_nik, from Russia, locked his horns with Jay Leeds, yes indeed geothermal from the USA, to solve six questions and take home the championship title.
Why and how can you benefit from LockOut?
“Everybody learns from their mistakes, but it takes an even wiser man to learn from others.”
This quote resonates and stands with everyone who is learning and working on their skills. One of the most common questions asked by almost all is how to develop the intuition to understand which algorithm or data structure logic to apply in a given question. This skill isn’t developed overnight and requires months of practice and hard work.
In the intense one hour of coding, you can silently observe and learn from a few of the best coders the country and world have seen. You can learn and understand the algorithm that they are applying for a particular question. You can also find these highly challenging questions solved by these coders here. So whenever you feel like practicing or maybe trying your hand at a complex problem, head over to these problems and try figuring out how you could have solved them.
Well, coders, that’s all about all the LockOuts for the time being. Stay tuned for the upcoming contests, and let us know in the comments below who you would like to see next!
